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Beeper acquired by Automattic

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#31

Post by isx726552 »

unshavedyak wrote: post #22
kilroy123 wrote: post #4

I hope they don't change the pricing after this. I've been using Beeper for a few years now.

What pricing? I've been on Beeper for a few months and i've not seen any. Ironically i joined because of iMessage, which got almost immediately ripped from me because Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple (... sorry, annoyed). When i joined the service was great, but the last couple months (basically since the iMessage drama) it has been weirdly unstable. I see a lot of encrypted messages (as in, the mess…

> Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple…

Publicity stunt to raise their visibility in hopes of acquisition. Today’s news shows it worked.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#32

Post by Philpax »

lagniappe wrote: post #15
jamesmunns wrote: post #2

I really like Beeper, and congrats to them for getting acquired, but my first reaction is "aw damn how long until the parts I love about Beeper get incredible journey'd away". The new android app is really good, the desktop app has always been a step up from other Element apps I've used (it is a distant fork, these days), I don't have iMessage, but it works great with Matrix and Signal and WhatsApp a ton of other "ra…

>incredible journey'd away I'm calling Webster's right now.

Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#33

Post by joenot443 »

Belphemur wrote: post #5

I wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com. They both look verify similar in their features. Maybe texts.com for the Apple Ecosystem and Beeper for the Android one ? After all, Beeper just released their new version of the app for Android.

Does anyone know how the texts.com iMessage integration works?

EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#34

Post by lxgr »

basisword wrote: post #25
ClaraForm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?

If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.

To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability.

The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won.

Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#35

Post by ClaraForm »

eugenekolo wrote: post #23
ClaraForm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?

That's a bit of my point. At any time your business model can get interrupted when you're doing things "that the big company isn't, but holds the gate to". Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost use…

I guess I didn’t think about it like that. If everyone opens up, Beeper’s competition is suddenly WhatsApp, instead of being one of their assets.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#37

Post by LorenDB »

philg_jr wrote: post #26

This is cool. I always knew that Matrix could theoretically support anything chat related, but I had no idea that Beeper existed and a company was formed around the idea. This is actually exciting to me. It sounds stupid, but I can't wait to ditch the Apple ecosystem.

Ditching Apple is not stupid at all. There's plenty of options that are less hostile overall and provide more choice.

See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#38

Post by joenot443 »

rchaud wrote: post #27
BadHumans wrote: post #18

If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.

Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).

I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding.

My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#39

Post by mvkel »

theamk wrote: post #14
eugenekolo wrote: post #7

Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.

I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time. (2) Generate lots of press visibility. (3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.

What makes automattic gullible?

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#40

Post by themoonisachees »

rchaud wrote: post #27
BadHumans wrote: post #18

If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.

Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).

Maybe.

It seems automattic is realizing that there is value in being "the established service that does what the giants are doing but isn't the giants". Personally and I think the HN crowd would agree with me, I see the value proposition in using Tumblr, beeper, WordPress over their competitors, simply because automattic has amassed a lot of consumer trust in not running things into the ground and making interesting things out of software that seems like it shouldn't be there.

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