WeChat’s world
economist.com
WeChat’s world
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: WeChat’s world
#2Social media chat is the new Facebook.
Re: WeChat’s world
#3.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet.
Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc.
Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page.
It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to please the users at all times, we the tech people have now created these golden cages for users - in which their identities are commodified and sold to the highest bidder.
This is not the Internet we once dreamed about and 'social media' apps like these are getting it further and further for that vision every day.
Re: WeChat’s world
#4Bit offtopic;
For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over.
Payments are nice when they do not take card here in China (as I do not have a CUP card).
But that, for me it is secondary: the always connected and stable is better. And that works on my mountain in Spain too :)
Edit: for people that always have fast internet, apps that are totally unusable with bad connections are: skype, slack, office 365 (google docs is still workable). OK apps are Facebook messenger, google hangouts, google docs and whatsapp. And so far the only that just works is Wechat.
Re: WeChat’s world
#5Bit offtopic; For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even…
I totally agree with your comment about apps unusable with poor connections. I've been away camping for a few days, the campsite was in a forest with a weak 2G connection; web pages would load slowly, so the link did work, but most apps gave up and timed out instead of using the connection. A chat app like Google Hangouts should be able to send and receive tiny text messages just fine over 2G, but apparently app developers put in too short timeouts.
Re: WeChat’s world
#6.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet. Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc. Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page. It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to…
So don't use it? I'm not sure how your comments reflect on WeChat; it's not like stores are insisting on you paying through the app, or that businesses are forcing you to use WeChat to contact them. It's an added convenience, and it seems people like that.
Re: WeChat’s world
#7.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet. Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc. Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page. It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to…
There really should be some standards that specified how chat bubbles can have the same set of functionality as FB Messenger, WeChat, Kik, Google's Allo and others. It's becoming more common to have "interactive" chat messages with buttons inside, or messages that makes buttons appear somewhere on the bottoms of the screen.
Re: WeChat’s world
#8.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet. Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc. Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page. It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to…
So don't use it? I'm not sure how your comments reflect on WeChat; it's not like stores are insisting on you paying through the app, or that businesses are forcing you to use WeChat to contact them. It's an added convenience, and it seems people like that.
> So don't use it?
That's an old argument which totally ignores the network effect.
Re: WeChat’s world
#9.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet. Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc. Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page. It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to…
There really should be some standards that specified how chat bubbles can have the same set of functionality as FB Messenger, WeChat, Kik, Google's Allo and others. It's becoming more common to have "interactive" chat messages with buttons inside, or messages that makes buttons appear somewhere on the bottoms of the screen.
It would be better if communication technology with more than (say) 1M users would be forced to obey open standards. This is the case for telephony, so why not enforce it for social media as well?
Re: WeChat’s world
#10.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the Internet. Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc. Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page. It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to…
This development is backwards, it reverses everything what is great about the Internet and made it such superior and successful. Instead of a network of networks where everyone can freely share information and talk to anybody, even directly via standardized protocols it's going back to heavily centralized systems, to the last bit controlled by a a small set of commercial entities which even do not see the user as a customer. WeChat is a dystopia which is not unlikely to become also true in the rest of the wold. No matter how nicely your cage is decorated, it's still a cage.