WhatsApp, WeChat or Snapchat? A dummies’ guide to the new messaging apps
Charles Miller
edits this blog. Twitter: @chblm
Just when I was feeling I'd generally got the hang of social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Skype and LinkedIn, I started hearing about a whole lot of new things with names like WhatChat and SnapApp.
I didn’t think I knew anyone who used them - until downloading one revealed how many of my contacts do. But to learn more, I got in touch with two expert practitioners, Federica De Caria and Pan Yue, both international journalism students at Brunel University, and asked them to explain all about these hugely successful messaging apps. Here’s their report:
Federica De Caria (left) and Pan Yue
According to new research from Analysys Mason, the amount of time per day consumers spend using smartphones almost doubled between 2011 and 2013, from 98 minutes to 195 minutes.
What are we doing spending that much time on our devices? Well, we’re posting, tweeting, texting and snapping. And as we move from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to Instagram, Skype and Vine, and on to WhatsApp, WeChat and Snapchat, each new app makes our actions faster and more interactive.
If your phone plan includes free data (or at least 3 gigabytes), or you’re always connected with wi-fi, you’re sorted. This is the power of these new apps. They all work through an internet connection - which doesn’t make the service free but does mean you won’t be charged for every different action, from calling to sending an SMS.
The two main categories these apps can be separated into are social networking and messaging apps. This is a beginner’s guide to the three biggest messaging apps:
What it does - WhatsApp lets you send and receive messages, pictures, audio, video, location and contacts, which once opened will be saved in your device. It’s the easiest way to send a text to people all over the world. Almost a year ago WhatsApp also introduced the ability to send voice messages
How you start using it - You simply download it and sign up, creating your own profile. The app will automatically go through your contacts, showing you who is registered for WhatsApp – and you may be surprised how many of your friends already are.
How you contact people - This is the best part. Not long ago, WhatsApp introduced the double blue tick. Ticks are signals that appear in the bottom-right corner of your message. One tick means ‘sent’; two ticks means ‘received’; and the vital double blue ticks means ‘read’. So now you can check whether the receiver has seen what you’ve sent. And the paranoia of ‘she/he has read it but didn’t answer me’ is removed
How we rate WhatsApp - It’s a drug. The app makes texting as fast as chatting, and it doesn’t matter where your friends are. You can make a group and open the conversation to as many friends as you want. In this way you can receive a picture from your friend in Denmark, a comment on it from another friend in Italy, and you can jump into the conversation whenever you want. This is the power of WhatsApp: there are simply no borders.
What it does - You can text, hold-to-talk, send photos and video to your friends, and share your photos and videos with friends using the function ‘Moment’ (a sharing function similar to that on Facebook). You can find new friends by using ‘Shake’, ‘People Nearby’ and ‘Drift Bottle’. Shake is when you shake your phone to find new friends who are shaking at the same time (obviously!). People Nearby helps you find new friends who are within a limited distance. And Drift Bottle lets people write anything anonymously, so others can pick up the ‘bottles’ randomly. If someone finds your bottle story interesting, then you can become friends. These are new and interesting ways to make friends, but most of the time people prefer to talk to their own friends
How you start using it - WeChat was created by the Tencent Group which owns QQ - an online chat community that’s been popular software in China for 10 years. You can register on WeChat either with your phone number or with an existing QQ number. If you register with your QQ number, your WeChat number shares the same password and you can easily find your QQ friends in WeChat. This helped WeChat become so big so fast
How you contact people - There are many ways to add new friends. You can choose ‘Add by ID’, ‘QQ contacts’ and ‘Mobile contacts’. Once you create a WeChat account, you get your own name card in QR code, and you can also add new friends by scanning their QR name cards. Video calls are also available as long as you are connected to wi-fi. And you can set a group if you want to talk to several friends at the same time
How we rate WeChat - It’s the app with everything. All my friends use it (writes Pan); my parents use it; and even my grandparents. It is convenient to text or call friends for free, and I can share interesting things I come across with all my friends in ‘Moment’. But WeChat has so many functions you might think there are too many, and that they make it complicated.
Snapchat
What it does - You can snap a photo or a brief video, add a caption and send it to a friend. The snaps are meant to disappear after a number of seconds, which you can set, from one to 10. But of course the recipient can take a screenshot when they receive a snap if they react quickly enough. And even if they don’t, they get ‘one replay a day’, which gives them the chance to see again one of the snaps they’ve received
How you start using it - The download is free and the only thing you need is an internet connection, as for WhatsApp. The icon is a little ghost in a yellow box, to remind you that ghosts and Snaps have the power to disappear. The app doesn’t connect automatically to your contacts, so once you create a profile you need to add friends one by one when you know their Snapchat names
How you contact people - You simply snap and send, adding a photo filter or drawing on your picture with the extra options the app gives you. Snapchat recently introduced the chance to send text messages as well as photos and video. The text messages won’t disappear once opened. And if you want your friend to see what’s going on in your day, you can create a ‘story’ and progressively add snaps that will be visible to your contacts for 24 hours
How we rate Snapchat - It’s perfect for the selfies maniac. It doesn’t matter if it’s a silly video or a pic - you’re alone or with your friends on Snapchat.
Conclusion
With all these competing services, the power is as much in their networking abilities and size of their user base as in the individual features they offer.
It’s knowing who we can contact that keeps us hooked. But can communicating with friends really be an addiction?
