Too Many Group Chats

This piece, you will notice, deviates slightly from my typical work. This will be more or less an opinion piece supported by facts which have led to these thoughts.

A little over a year ago, a fellow member of the Stevens Game Development Club Executive Board decided it was time to switch our built-in, cellular-based group chat over to the popular group messaging service GroupMe. I had of course heard of similar services, but I saw no reason for this switch. Why would I install an additional application that did what my native texting application already could? I also already had the Facebook Messenger application, which supported a faster, web-based group messaging service like GroupMe. With these thoughts as drivers, I participated in the new GroupMe chat via their SMS service, which uses a single number and delivers all texts to the non-app user with the senders name at the front. For example, If Jason and Pat messaged me, both messages would be received from the same arbitrary phone number, but Jason's would be prefaced with "Jason: ", Pat's with "Pat: ", and so on.

I had been in other group chats, of course, but all of these were handled through SMS/MMS and were connected with primarily iPhone users. iPhones use iMessage to connect to other Apple devices via the internet, thus obtaining a faster speed and higher quality service than standard SMS. Because most of the chats' members had iPhones, the speed of our group chats was rarely a concern and thus any argument ever made for switching a chat to Facebook was shot down by the iPhone users and their comfort with their current application.

After about a week of using the SMS GroupMe subscription, the clunkiness of SMS services became as apparent as ever. The other members of the Executive Board, who were all using the internet-based app, could deliver far more messages in a much shorter time, making it difficult to remain an active part of the conversation. Having an option I had never had with my iMessage loving friends, I chose to switch to the application version and began to use GroupMe. It was great, to say the least. I could add and remove members, change the group name, change my nickname, change the group avatar as well as my personal profile picture, send animated gifs and other pictures, send emojis, and many more very useful things. It even had a like button to accompany every message sent; I loved GroupMe.

Each of my group chats which were based on Facebook or in an SMS/MMS chat quickly moved to GroupMe and countless other chats were formed due to the convenience and ease of use that GroupMe offered in addition to its socially encouraging features. Finally, after months of fighting, I convinced my last iPhone-loyal friend group to switch to GroupMe. Eventually, after getting used to the change and seeing all it had to offer, they loved it too. In friend groups and organizations everywhere, GroupMe had successfully taken over. It turned out, however, that GroupMe was not the only service making its move over the last couple of years.

My friend Adam, with whom I was in multiple group chats, convinced one of his Facebook group chats to switch over to Telegram. With an easy-to-use bot API available, Adam had written a bot for the application Telegram with which the users in the chat could call a number of functions. With an otherwise similar (and in my opinion lesser) feature set to GroupMe, Telegram offered no clear advantages to me. Last September, however, the draw of the bot lured one of my group chats to switch from GroupMe over to Telegram. As such, I was forced to comply (or otherwise not participate) and add another messenger to my phone. With this new messenger to play with spawned a variety of new group chats, most of which I have decided to mute because they are simply excessive

Similarly, the service Slack has been invading the Stevens Institute of Technology campus for some time now. Claiming to offer much more than typical group chat applications and services, Slack is a team working service which allows users to have multiple channels per team, file sharing, and an overwhelming variety of other supported features. Recently, the Student Government Association has agreed that it will be making a Slack for its members to help cut-down on on email-chains. Having surrendered to the fact that yet another group messenger will end up on my phone, I also agreed to use Slack as the medium for starting the SGDC general body chat, which would be more inclusive than the previously existing e-board chat.

What scared me even more, however, was when I heard that one of the biggest Slack supporters on campus commented that "Slack is getting too mainstream, we have to switch to a different open source service."

With four different group messengers on my phone, each offering some unique feature set but all grounded in the same premise, it is beginning to feel redundant. Keeping up with all four of these messengers, Facebook. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, emails, and (and maybe this is crazy) normal text messages (gasp!), my phone is used less as a communication and work tool and more as an over complicated social chain. With so many services and each service providing so many sub-services and different chats, it is sometimes impossible to actively follow every conversation and interaction. Additionally, group chat psychology has another series of interesting (and probably quite disputable) implications, however, I will leave that to be possibly examined in a follow-up piece.

The point I'm getting at and the question I'm posing is "Why do we need so many different social services?" At what point are we going to say it's too much? Apps used to offer something unique and cool, giving you new features to access on your mobile device. Now, however, despite being a mobile developer, I still spend a majority of my time on my phone using one of these same four applications which all accomplish the same fundamental goal: group communication. So many resources are being put into developing these free messaging applications (for seemingly no point), and I wonder what those developers could be doing instead. What could I have better spent my time doing instead of learning four different ways to contact multiple people at once? And even more, each time I need to re-create my profile. I have so many profiles that I have a special task-bar on my personal website specifically for organizing all of my profiles.

This, to be blunt, is ridiculous. There are too many group messengers, and we need to pick one and move on.