WeChat: The Social Messaging Service

WeChat (Chinese: Wēixìn / 微信) is a “social messaging”-service, which in these days steals major market shares from various different social- and messaging services across the globe. WeChat was launched in January 2011 by the major Chinese company, Tencent Holdings Limited (腾讯控股有限公司). Tencent is also the company behind the most used “instant messaging”-service called QQ, which currently has about 800 million users, and the next most used “microblogging”-service in China called Tencent Weibo, while the largest is called Sina Weibo.

Currently, WeChat has near 500 million users, and this number is rising at the speed of light. This massive growth is not only caused by the Chinese market, because the international customers have also begun to use WeChat – this includes more than 100 million users.

In China, most people use this service, while also businesses such as taxi companies, takeaway food / restaurants, etc. have begun to accept partly bookings, but also payments through the built-in Tenpay (only in China) mobile wallet system. According to 36kr, more than 100.000 taxi rides were booked during the first 9 days of service through WeChat. Furthermore, the most news agencies, celebrities, etc. are available there for both automatic news feeds delivered to your smartphone, and support / interaction directly through the app itself.

WeChat is currently available for the most platforms, including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, S40 & Symbian, as well as a Web version, which is activated by scanning an unique QR-code on the computer screen, and allow the session through the WeChat app. The company has even developed an SDK for both Android, and iOS – that makes you able to develop apps that more or less directly interact with the WeChat platform / environment.

What really makes WeChat standout compared to other greater or lesser popular substitutes, such as WhatsApp (USA), Kik (USA), Line (Japan), and KakaoTalk (South Korea), is partly the very stable platform, every action is handled quickly, and that you get many built-in features, like Calls with or without Video, Voice messages, PTT / Walkie-Talkie, File sharing, Timed pictures (similar to Snapchat), Stickers, and Groups of up to 100 people. All those features are very fine to have, but the most used extra feature is in English called “Moments”. This is more a social network like feature, where you can share pictures, text messages, and links with all of your friends at once, and your friends can thumbs up, or comment on your post. Moments works like a social feed, and a dairy sorted by date.

The special thing about Moments is that only your friends can see your posts by default, and you are only able to see likes and comments from those you are friends with. For instance, if I posted a picture through Moments, then all of my personal friends would see it in their feeds, and they can all Like or Comment on the post, but only I would be able to view all of the interactions with the post. My friends would only be able to view likes and comments from our shared friends.

Especially in these modern days; we see a tendency moving towards more simple social networking services. Services, where you quickly submit a picture, or text post to your friends, and then quickly get back to the real world, because what you see outside is still what’s the most important, and where the fun stuff happens.

As you might have noticed already; WeChat is an app of many features, which probably sounds a bit messy when reading this, but the app itself is very well structured, and available in many languages, including English of course.

According to Pingwest, the next Android release (WeChat 5.2) should include LinkedIn integration, and an all-new Android UI, instead of the current “old” iOS-kinda look, as seen in the following screenshots.

Tips & Tricks
Here are a few tips that even a current user might not have discovered yet.

WeChat has no “Delivery Confirmation”-feature. This is intentional, because many people do feel a pressure to reply promptly, when they know that the friend is able to see, that you have already read the message.
Tap and Hold the “Camera”-button in Moments to get the option to share a text-only post.
Friend Recommendations through your Mobile Contacts, and through various social networks, including Facebook, Google+, QQ, and a rumor is currently circulating that WeChat will soon team up with LinkedIn to bring your business contacts into the app as well.
Meeting new people through “Look Around” to find people nearby, who have activated the feature. “Shake” will hook you up with people around the globe, who shake their device at the same time as you. “Drift Bottle” makes you able to drop a bottle in the WeChat sea, containing a text or voice message that another person will pick up, and eventually reply to, or throw it back into the water.
The Web version of WeChat: This feature makes you able to chat with your friends in the browser, while still keeping your history synced between all your devices. Furthermore, you are able to share files from your computer to your smartphone, and vice versa.
Download or add your own Custom Stickers: Those stickers can both be still pictures, or animated pictures that you send to each other as more “advanced” emoticons.
Save notes for yourself in the Cloud: You can save everything here that you would be able to send to another contact. This means texts, voice messages, pictures, links and files, and by that keep a synced notes list in your pocket.
Games with Leaderboards: WeChat is currently in the introduction process of adding simple arcade / puzzle games to the platform; where you compete against your friends’ high scores every week.
Share your Moments to other social networks, including Twitter.
Look through or Search your whole History of conversations with a specific contact.
Backup and Sync all of your Chat History to a local file.
Mark Messages and Moments as Favourites, and they will be saved and synced between your devices. Those are also searchable.
Easily add a new friend by either using your unique WeChat ID, make the other person scan your QR-code, or use the “Hold Together”-feature, which will show people within 1 meter, who are using the feature at the same time.