Okay Geek Farm
Kik Messenger - The Text Message Killer?
Connor Scalleat
Kik is a rather new message service which works across different mobile platforms. Kik works on the iLineup (iPod Touch, iPhone), Blackberry, and Android. If you have never heard of it don’t worry, Kik essentially grows as one person has it in your social circle leading to the entire group having it. The service is essentially a Blackberry messenger with the exception that it can be employed over several types of devices. The elevator pitch of Kik is that it is a free, real-time text messaging service, but despite how great it sounds on paper once you get to used to it, I promise you won’t be as impressed.
The Review (iPhone)
To start off, Kik’s application works. In fact, it feels like it was directly built by an entire engineering team and not just one single person. The idea of Kik is a great one; anything that could eliminate my text messaging bill would be amazing, but unfortunately after trying out I gotta say that this is certianly not the way I’m going to do it.
An example of a major fail moment in this service is when someone texted me to tell me to check my Kik. It would be one thing if Kik had multimedia on it and someone sent me a picture or a file, since I would’ve had to check my texts for that, but the person just sent me text telling me to check my messages on Kik, which could have easily been sent through SMS in the first place. Now people that are absolutely addicted to this service have told me that it’s having a real-time status on your messages that makes it amazing. And by this they mean you can tell when someone is typing a message, when they have read the message, or when they haven’t read the message at all. Sure, this is pretty awesome but its problems outweigh its positives. For instance, another huge issue I have with Kik is on iOS, when it alerts you through Push Notifications, which through experience isn’t the most reliable system, and I would be afraid to turn my phone off if I was waiting for a message. The biggest downfall of all is most people don’t have it, and until it becomes pre-installed like BBM, I have a feeling most people won’t waste their time with it, including me.
Overall, I say don’t download, it is a trending service that will go away rather quickly unless it’s updated to a point where you’ll go to it first ahead of your texts.
Where Kik Needs to Go
Earlier I said that Kik is an amazing sounding service on paper, but the way this company went about implementing it is definitely not working. The service is in direct competition with SMS, and it only has two features to compete with, and a multitude of features of which SMS has over it. Kik needs to really make itself different by building upon its own features.
One way to improvise off the bat would be by Kik hiring a graphic designer, one way that they could really compete with stock SMS is the customization market. Kik could allow you to skin the interface, change the alert sounds, and take a totally different direction with their product. Another way which Kik could really be competitive is offer their service online in a web-app which would really be unique and it would allow you to send messages from your computer to peoples mobile phones. Along with launching a web app, an email equivalent would really compliment the entire experience; having the ability to send people documents and pictures either from or to their mobile devices would be awesome! Once Kik implements more features such as these above, I feel like it might one day make “texting” useless - taking everything that SMS does and for free. Until then, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Do you use Kik? If so, then why not post a comment below and tell me why you use it over SMS. We’d appreciate your feedback.
Kik Messenger / Download
