What is Kik Messenger, besides popular all of a sudden?

My Facebook is being inundated with strange updates from friends such as “kik: Miamigurl.” As I laced up the Timberlands and set out to find her, I realized my friends are referring to a new(er) messaging platform and not the art of putting rubber to behind. Kik Messenger is rapidly growing, taking in 150,000 new users in a single day. From 30,000 to 450,000 users in a week is very impressive indeed. The re-branding of 2009’s “Unsynced” has worked out very well for the Waterloo, Ontario development team.

Being the sucker for early adoption that I am I quickly downloaded it on my Samsung Fascinate, registered, settled on a user-name, and was up and running within 30 seconds. My initial impressions and thoughts:

•    BBM functionality – kinda creepy really.
The big feature of Kik is that users can see when contacts have opened and read their messages. This is a very popular feature of BlackBerry’s messaging service as people appreciate confirming delivery. However, to me it just seems like a great method to get into trouble with an overbearing spouse or girlfriend. I can hear the “I know you received my message, so where is the dry-cleaning?” argument now.

•    Who doesn’t have unlimited text these days?
Kik uses your data plan, as opposed to your SMS/text plan, to send messages. This is a great way to stay within your text messaging plan. However, I am not sure who exactly would be using this application that doesn’t have unlimited text in the first place.

•    Who are these people?
I’m not sure where Kik is pulling my suggested contacts from, but I do know that I don’t know over 75% of them. Weird.

Kik provides a very user-friendly interface, more functionality than traditional texting (platform independent smilies!), and a great way for iPhone, Droid, and BlackBerry users to stay connected with each other. I think it will stick around and be heavily used, just not by me. Kik gets a 5/5 for young adults who constantly text each other, but not very useful for everyone else.



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