When a message was sent, a tiny letter “D” would appear beside it. Read receipts were introduced alongside BBM in 2005. BBM helped create one of the most anxiety-inducing messaging features that still exists today: read receipts. Ironically, one of the most cited reasons on Crackberry defending BBM’s superiority is also partially a reason why my relationship fizzled out. “It makes SMS look ancient,” another added. “It’s like an exclusive club,” one Crackberry member mused.
WHAT IS BBM FOR ANDROID PHONES FULL
Early messages on the Crackberry forum are full of people trying to sum up why BBM felt better to use than standard text messages. I wasn’t the only person who felt this way about BBM, either.
If anything, the latter felt even more intimate and safe. There was no difference for me at 15 between my physical relationship with this person and our life on BBM.
Every time I saw my Bold’s flashing green light turn red, signifying a new message, I experienced that little burst of warmth in the pit of my stomach. Yes, in 2008, I did the BBM equivalent of sliding into the DMs. We became close through constant group chats with our pals, and eventually, we split off into direct messaging. It was also through BBM’s group chat function that I entered my first high school relationship. I didn’t have to wait until I was home to log on to MSN Messenger to continue talking to my friends. It sounds silly to say today, when WhatsApp has more than a billion users and group chats are part of our daily lives, but back then, it was sensational. We became a perfect batch of new BlackBerry users My friends and I were some of the earliest ones. By 2013, BBM had 60 million monthly active users. RIM already made a name for itself among businesses and governments, but then it started reaching a crucial new audience: young consumers. We became a perfect batch of new BlackBerry users. Through BBM, those individual text messages soon morphed into elaborate, endless group chats. Some people got new devices from their parents as birthday gifts, others used old recycled phones. My friends and I texted every single day and night. I was in the 10th grade and, like everyone else, my life revolved around my phone. Despite BBM’s weaknesses, it became the app that defined my early high school experience for two main reasons: group chats and a striking similarity to desktop IM platforms like AIM. The text bubbles were cluttered, the user interface felt clunky when navigating between messages, and if the wheel on your BlackBerry got stuck, good luck scrolling through messages. BBM looked like an early version of Facebook’s WhatsApp. BBM managed to take traditional desktop messaging and translate it to the tiny computers in our pockets. People could choose to use a BBM account tied to their unique BlackBerry Pin rather than send a standard text message. Today, after years of dwindling usage and financial woes from BlackBerry developer RIM, BlackBerry Messenger is going away for good.īlackBerry Messenger (better known as BBM) was one of the first instant messaging (IM) platforms that arrived on mobile devices in 2005. It became a defining characteristic on BlackBerry devices and forever changed how business and casual conversations were held by phone users. But it had one thing the iPhone 3G didn’t: BlackBerry Messenger. Unlike the iPhone 3G, which touted a revolutionary design when it was announced just a month later in 2008, the BlackBerry Bold wasn’t super flashy.
My favorite phone of all time is the BlackBerry Bold 9000.
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