Comes Friday, Messenger will be history. It shall be retired in favour of Skype.
As I reflect on this statement, I’m reminiscing the times where Instant Messaging (IM) regime supreme, and Messenger was at the forefront of this wave.
Dear Messenger,
You allowed us to change our status to whatever we wanted. If we feel like appearing offline, we could do so and at the same time, we would message our friends using our offline status.
You allowed us to broadcast what we were feeling at that time, and our new change of message would be read and enquired about. Back then, status update wasn’t common so the curious part of us naturally wanted to read, decipher and find out more about the meaning behind the message.
You enabled me to know whether the other party is typing, so I wouldn’t know stupid if indeed the lady behind the monitor turned out to be a bot.
You did one thing and you pulled it off wonderfully. At your core, you provide a platform to bring everyone together. You influenced the way we exchange information and set the standards for instant messaging.
In that little window of yours, we’d chat, share stories and pictures. I remember having group chats involving many close friends, and the conversation would be filled with laughters and some random nonsense. Conversation would dragged late into the night and we’d continue where we had left off the following morning when we met.
But like all good things come to and end, your decline is inevitable. Over time, as your service becomes more popular, so does the bots and spams. Redundant features were added in, the ship is bloated with things people have little use for. The decline would be further compounded by the emergence of apps like Whatsapp, and the ease of keeping in touch with friends via the built in Facebook messenger.
In the age of social connectivity, we have never seem so far disconnected from each other. It’s ironic, and it’s best summed up by the following:
Others before me have lamented how, in an age where communication so is easily facilitated by the internet, we lose something of the depth and intimacy that a telephone call, hand-written letter or long face-to-face chat bestow. I think when it becomes so easy to ‘keep in touch’ with someone by posting on their wall, dropping them a chat message etc, you can build up a false sense of maintaining a relationship, when in reality it wilts in the absence of more genuine contact.
Thank you Messenger, for giving us (particularly me) for so much memories.