Kik Introduces Hashtags To Bring Mini Social Networks To Its Messaging Service

Messaging app Kik is embracing one of the hallmarks of social networks after it introduced hashtags to its service. An update to the iOS and Android apps today turns hashtags into clickable links to chat groups where Kik believes like minded users can congregate to discuss topics, share photos/information and (potentially) meet new people.

It’s been a busy year for Kik. The Canadian company recently raised $38 million and completed its first acquisition (buying messaging app GIF Relay) — 2014 has seen it push into content and monetization with the launch of an in-app browser to bring the internet to chats,promoted chats to (finally) involve brands, and more safety features.

Now, with hashtags, Kik co-founder and CEO Ted Livingston said the company is back to the basics.

“Hashtags resumes our focus on the core chat experience. We’ve spent a lot of time building up content, and now we think we’ve nailed the platform,” Livingston told TechCrunch in an interview.

Livingston said the inspiration for hashtags comes from the early days of Facebook when users didn’t worry about their updates because the service was just used by friends. Nowadays, they need to keel a balance between fun and also what is acceptable in the eyes of employers, family and others, he said.

Hashtags is also a response to his own experience, too.

“Groups can be so annoying to make,” Livingston explained. “That really hit home when I got married this summer — it was super tedious to add everyone but important to have us all together.”

Now Kik users can communicate around a wedding, Christmas party or any other event by dreaming up a hashtag for their group of up to 50 users. Others enter the group once they click on the hashtag, or open it up for themselves, removing much of the friction involved in pulling large numbers of people together.



Beyond just events, Livingston said hashtags could be used to discuss any topic — right from cars, to football, to fashion. Users can make the hashtag obvious if they want to attract attention, or more obscure (and thus harder to find) if they want to keep things to those they know. (Kik provides group admin tools to ensure unwanted users can be booted out of groups, or banned, if necessary.)

There is even the potential for brands to get involved.

A handpicked few have stepped onto Kik’s platform with its promoted chat service — which lets them run a responsive but ultimately unmanned account to engage with users — and they could use hashtags to collect ideas, see what users are saying, or run existing social media campaigns on Kik. Hashtags are, after all, supported on multiple social networks beyond just Twitter these days.

Emulating WeChat

More generally, however, the introduction of hashtags follows Kik’s longer term goal of being a platform rather than merely an SMS replacement, such is the case with Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

Waterloo-based Kik claims to have the ears thumbs of the youth in North America. It doesn’t reveal monthly active user figures, but it recently passed 185 million registered users. Livingston said 68 percent of that number are based in the U.S. — which, Kik claims, means around 40 percent of Americans aged between 13-25 have an account on the service.

Livingston believes that this level of adoption, which continues to grow, gives Kik the chance to be the window into all things mobile for North America’s youth.

“Everyone is working towards emulating WeChat,” he said, echoing the sentiments of a recent op-ed on the Chinese messaging app. “WeChat powers your life via chat, you can do anything with chat at the core, even pay your bills.”

Payments is the next major step for Kik, and it is one that rival Snapchat has already taken and Facebook Messenger looks set to make soon.

Livingston didn’t reveal when Kik would enter the fray and introduce its own service, but we’d hazard a bet that the first half of next year might be an opportune time for Kik Pay to surface.

Hot Competition

Kik is up against some serious competition, though.

Snapchat is the darling of Silicon Valley. It has raised over $160 million for its innovative disappearing chat app, and has rebuffed advances from Facebook which reportedly included a $3 billion acquisition offer.

The company and CEO Evan Spiegel tend to adopt a high-profile approach, in total contrast to Kik and Livingston, and are also keen to turn their service into a mobile platform modeled on — you guessed it — WeChat.

Facebook may be a comparative veteran, but it is also funneling resources into the chat app race. Its acquisition of WhatsApp looks like a bid to own the next billion-user platform and push into the emerging market ecosystem, but Messenger is becoming a WeChat-like platform too.

Aside from this summer’s hiring of PayPal CEO David Marcus to lead the Messenger business, Facebook decoupled Messenger from its main app, is working toward payments and is cognizant of the way messaging apps have become a gateway to the mobile Internet in China and other parts of Asia.

Viber adds social games to messaging platform, featuring its own unique characters

Viber, one of the most widely used messaging apps for mobile, has announced it’s releasing a series of social games, ready to further challenge apps such as Line and WeChat. Initially, Viber has three games which will go live in a selection of markets very soon, with a worldwide launch expected to follow in January.

The three games are Viber Candy Mania, Viber Pop, and Wild Luck Casino. All are linked to your Viber account, and connect to leaderboards where scores can be shared, and friends challenged. Messages and notifications related to the games will appear in a dedicated section of the app. The games are free to play, while various items can be purchased in each one, and related virtual gifts will be sold; which is where Viber will make its money.

Viber’s games will make use of its unique characters which users will recognize from its sticker collections. For example, Violet and Legcat both feature in Candy Mania and Viber Pop.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Viber’s founder, Talmon Marco, said it’s not planning to flood its users with hundreds of games, but wants to keep it down to a “small, highly curated selection.” While it has partnered with just two studios at launch, it will sign up other developers in the future.

Viber’s games will be available for Android and iOS, while players in Singapore, Malaysia, Israel, Ukraine, and Belerus will be the first to try them out. A staggered, global launch will follow in January next year. Viber was purchased by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten earlier this year, and boasts on its website it has more than 360 million users in 193 countries around the world.

Line Purges Its Games Platform Again, Removing 15 Titles From Its Messaging Service

Today may be holiday time in the U.S., but it also seems to be a time for cleaning in Japan.Line, the messaging app company with 500 million registered users, just announced the closure of 15 of its third-party games, that’s
nearly half of the titles on its games platform and its second purge in six months.

In an announcement made suspiciously late on Friday evening Japanese time (to bury the news?), the company said the games — which include the likes of Punch Hero, Homerun Battle Burst, Sonic Dash S and Zookeeper — were closed to “focus its resources on titles that are enjoying greater growth in order to further propel the service as a global gaming platform.”

You won’t find games on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, but they are a major part of the Line experience. Users download separate apps for iOS and Android which then link up to their Line app to provide a game ID and the ability to share scores, battle friends and more. The service also offers non-gaming companion apps, which include apps for sticker creation, translations, photos and more.

With those 15 games removed from app stores, Line now offers 43 apps for iOS and 55 for Google Play — around half of those are games, including Disney Tsum Tsum (below) which has 30 million downloads. Line introduced its games platform in November 2012, and the company said this month it had clocked 470 million cumulative downloads.



Games barely affect Line users that don’t play them, but they can be hugely lucrative. In-app purchases — such as power-ups or boosters — from apps on the games platform collectively account for over half of Line’s revenue, which doubled annually to reach $192 million in Q3 2014.

Line, which this year postponed an IPO at a reported valuation of $10 billion valuation, shut one-third of its games (20 titles) back in June of this year, so a second purge just months later suggests that many of its titles were not sufficiently engaging or quickly became too dated.

The need for new material could mean titles from Gumi, the Japanese games studio Line invested in this summer, and 4:33, a Korean company that Line and Tencent jointly put $110 million into. Either way, compelling content is important for keeping existing users engaged, reaching new users and maintaining Line’s revenue growth — that latter point is particularly crucial as Line is likely to reassess its plan to go public in 2015.

Line was among the first to offer games, but these days U.S.-based duo Tango and Kik include similar services too, as well as Kakao Talk in Korea and WeChat in China. Facebook recently revealed that it tested highlighting games, before ultimately deciding to focus its platform and vast reach on app install ads instead.

Those new blue check marks in WhatsApp mean your message has been read

WhatsApp, one of the most widely used cross-platform messaging services in the world, has a new feature, and it’s one which has been strangely missing all this time. The check marks which appear after you send a message now have a third stage, which shows when the message has been viewed.

Anyone who uses the app will be familiar with the single, then double ticks which show up under your outgoing messages. The first denotes it being sent successfully, while the second double ticks indicated the message had arrived on the other phone. Now, those two ticks will turn blue once the message has been read.

Prior to this, the only way to work out if your friend had read your message was to use the “Last seen” date and time stamp below their name. This new method is simpler, and likely more accurate. It’s also somewhat surprising it has never been implemented before.

If you’re about to head over to your preferred app store to grab the WhatsApp update to get the feature, there’s no need. This isn’t part of a new version of the app, and it should already be live now, after being pushed out over-the-air by the Facebook-owned company. Details of the alteration are listed on the WhatsApp FAQ.

In August, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum confirmed the service had 600 million monthly active users, beating competition from WeChat, which had 438 million users around the same time, and Line with around 400 million users. WhatsApp is free to download and use for the first year, after which time you’ll need to pay $1 per year to continue using the service.

Google Voice Finally Supports MMS On AT&T, Sprint, And Nearly 100 Other Carriers

If you’ve ever tried to receive a picture message with your Google Voice number, you might’ve noticed something rather crucial: it… probably didn’t work. For the most part, MMS heading into the service would just vanish into the ether.

No longer!

According to a Plus post by Googler Alex Wiesen, Google Voice MMS should work now on “AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Canada, and many more” North American carriers.

Notice the omission? While the full list of now-supported carriers hasn’t been published yet, it seemed odd that Verizon wasn’t name checked. Sure enough, it looks like they’re the only major U.S. carrier that hasn’t hopped on board. Without naming names, Wiesen asks anyone who works at an unsupported carrier to reach out for the sake of “text messaging interoperability.”


While Google Voice MMS support has popped up from time to time on select carriers, it’s always been a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes you could send an MMS to someone, but notreceive an MMS from the same person — or vice versa. Sometimes it’d work one day, but not the next. With today’s (albeit quiet) announcement, it’ll hopefully be a lot more reliable moving forward.



It still seems to be a bit wonky in our testing (some people get the pictures as links; others as photo attachments; some still not at all), but it’s a nice step in the right direction after a pretty long stretch of silence from the Google Voice team.

One catch: because of all the behind-the-curtain trickery Google is doing to pull this off, group MMS doesn’t work quite like you’d expect. You’ll still receive them, but as a bunch of individual messages. Which kind of defeats the point.