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Beeper acquired by Automattic

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#301

Post by freedomben »

photomatt wrote: post #235
freedomben wrote: post #197

and they're rewriting Beeper in PHP as a WordPress plugin! Kidding of course, but on a serious note what's the strategic value of Beeper here to Automattic? From the post: > Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit o…

Our three missions are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. This fits in the third.

Thank you! What does Beeper bring to the table that texts.com doesn't or can't? Is this elimination of a competitor or is it a merging of two mostly complementary things?

(to clarify, I don't mean "elimination of a competitor" with a value jodgment on it btw. It isn't inherently a good or a bad thing, just depends on lots of variables)

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#302

Post by joenot443 »

ravetcofx wrote: post #257
joenot443 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Static HTML is even cheaper. I don't understand how some people can't think outside of CMS land

In my case it's because sometimes my clients like to publish or make edits without my intervention.

My own personal site is static HTML mirrored against Cloudflare, I do definitely see the advantage when it's there :)

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#303

Post by Grustaf »

talldayo wrote: post #300
paulmd wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those exploits have existed for 10-15 years, they are as old as the hackintosh community. There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage - just like with legacy emulation vs pirating. And no, apple really hasn’t come down despite knowing it exists, and probably wouldn’t have without beeper.

> they are as old as the hackintosh community. Serial spoofing is, but Apple cracks down on that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/t9p5ff/psa_usin... It's really not fair to say that the scene was "just fine" up until Beeper went commercial. In those 10-15 years, there were a lot of changes intended to segregate Hackintoshes from Macintoshes. > There is a difference between commercial exploitation and…

> What damages would Apple claim?

They don't need to claim any damages, this is not a legal question, they can just close the loopholes.

> the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.

No, the issue is not that they are "solving an Apple-designed problem" (whatever that problem may be), it's that they did it by leeching off of Apple's infrastructure.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#304

Post by talldayo »

Grustaf wrote: post #303
talldayo wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are as old as the hackintosh community. Serial spoofing is, but Apple cracks down on that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/t9p5ff/psa_usin... It's really not fair to say that the scene was "just fine" up until Beeper went commercial. In those 10-15 years, there were a lot of changes intended to segregate Hackintoshes from Macintoshes. > There is a difference between commercial exploitation and…

> What damages would Apple claim? They don't need to claim any damages, this is not a legal question, they can just close the loopholes. > the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem. No, the issue is not that they are "solving an Apple-designed problem" (whatever that problem may be), it's that they did it by leeching off of Apple's infrastructure.

Beeper's solution didn't overhelp themselves to Apple's infrastructure, though. They used iMessage like a legitimate user would, and then charged customers for the automation. If that's leeching, then thousands of iOS and Mac users around the world are also leeching off Apple's service too.

I won't contest that it's Apple's decision how to present iMessage. The idea that Beeper killed iMessage spoofing is a hysterical assertion though, when people will readily admit that it was Apple's double-standard keeping it alive in the first place.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#306

Post by rw_grim »

erohead wrote: post #268
rw_grim wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.

Grim, I apologize. I spoke too soon. I didn't mean to offend you or demean pidgin. I was reacting too harshly to the parent.

Thank you for apologizing.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#307

Post by omaranto »

duxup wrote: post #125

>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks. What are people using that for? Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?

> feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.

You do not need to be on all 14 to find Beeper useful! Even if you only use a few you might still want them to be together in a single app. As to why you might be on several different chat networks, you might have different friend or family circles that use different chat networks and may have failed to convinced them to move to a single one or, like me, may think it is a bad use of time to even attempt to convince them to. I'm using Beeper for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Discord and it's great!

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#308

Post by mintplant »

Grustaf wrote: post #287
mintplant wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can host the bridges yourself: https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager

Seems like an insane amount of work for the satisfaction of only having to check one chat app.

I think you underestimate how painful wrangling the proliferation of chat apps can be!

Another application is resource-constrained devices. I love the netbook form-factor, but my little Intel N200 machine buckles under the strain of running what amounts to six web browsers simultaneously (because everything is Electron now) in order to receive notifications from all the chat networks I have people on.

It can also be nice to have a kind of buffer layer in between you and the chat network, which doesn't necessarily have your interests in mind. For example, Facebook Messenger's Android app somehow managed to wake up my phone's screen every time it received a notification, despite my turning off every related setting and permission I could find. So I put it behind Beeper and the problem is gone.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#309

Post by rattray »

artdigital wrote: post #259
rattray wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.

I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup. Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc. (The iOS app is on…

ah, yeah their instagram integration is often pretty rough.

Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic

#310

Post by rw_grim »

kevstev wrote: post #224
theogravity wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trillian was my first client. It looks like it still exists and now runs on a subscription model: https://trillian.im/ Also looks like it no longer connects to multiple networks, but uses their own now.

Ha thanks for jogging my memory. I knew pidgin wasn't the first or even the primary one I used but I couldn't recall what else I had used.

I believe EveryBuddy was the first multiprotocol client, but then Gaim got revived and took a bunch of the work the EveryBuddy developers did. As time went on Gaim became Pidgin, and EveryBuddy became Ayttm.
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