Blackberry Messenger (BBM), the once popular messaging platform that would find only in Blackberries is shutting down today.
The platform was taken over by Emtek, an Indonesia based media conglomerate around 3 years ago. They set out to ‘reinvigorate’ BBM as a cross platform service but this did not happen according to their plans.
“We poured our hearts into making this a reality and we are proud of what we have built to date, they said earlier on.
The reason that they are shutting down BBM is the fact that the tech industry is very dynamic in this messaging space. ” The technology industry however is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms while new users proved difficult to sign up,” they said.
According to Crackberry the other reason that BBM might not have caught on later is the fact that it became bloated. It started being a social media platform, m-commerce, gaming platform, advertiser platform as well as a collaboration too. This might have been too much, especially when you compare to its roots where it was a basic app that was focused on messaging and did not use a lot of data.
Although the commercial version of Blackberry Messenger is ending, they are now offering BBM Enterprise. Blackberry Messenge enterprise goes back to the basic where you chat in groups or one on one with your trusted contacts, edit, retract or set expiry times on your message or photos and share files, voice notes or location. BBMe will be free for one year then after the first year, a 6 month subscription will be available for $2.49.
Recently, Blackberry sued Twitter for infringing on its mobile messaging patents and well after this news, we wonder how that will pan out at the end.
