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"Just in time for SXSW 2013 comes MessageMe, a new iOS and Android app that offers group and individual messaging, but with twist.\nOn the surface, MessageMe looks like any group or individual messaging app \u2014 such as GroupMe or WhatsApp. You can send messages, of course, just as one would via SMS.\nThe difference is that with MessageMe, you can also send other types of content too, including photos, songs, videos, audio recordings and even doodles.\nWhatsApp and some other messaging apps allow for the attachment of media, but MessageMe feels much faster. Moreover, the speed in which users can attach other content to a message is near instantaneous.\nFor instance, when adding a video, I can shoot a new video, upload an existing video on my phone, or search YouTube to add a video to chat that will play inline. This is very powerful because it makes adding context to a message much more seamless. I don't have to open up YouTube, copy the link, return to my messaging app and paste it \u2014 I can do it all from one interface.\n\nThe same is true for photos. You can search Google Images in addition to picking from your phone's camera roll or taking a new photo. For music, the iOS version lets you add a clip via iTunes and users can even buy a song from within MessageMe if they like what they hear.\nThe app was also designed to be very easy on battery life \u2014 something that can't be said for all messaging apps. Users can add friends via SMS, email or by inviting them from Facebook.\nIf you let the app access your address book, it can even tell you what contacts are already in the MessageMe system. As a nice touch, I was instantly able to see what Facebook friends and who in my address book were already in the system.\nRather than trying to add everyone you might know to your contact list, MessageMe is designed like traditional SMS. You'll need to have a prior connection with a person to contact them, but just because you send a message doesn't mean that person has to respond.\nUsers get push notifications of messages in lieu of SMS and it can be used all over the world.\nUnlike some messaging services, MessageMe is focused on phones and tablets. Plus once a user signs up for an account, he or she can sign in with another device and all messages are kept in-sync across devices.\nThis is great for someone like me who has an iPhone and iPad, but also regularly uses and tests Android phones and tablets.\nWhile the team has no immediate plans for BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone, it is looking at both platforms and hopes to be able to bring the experience to more platforms in the future. \nAdding Context to Messaging\nWhen building a new social or communications app, gaining a critical mass and frequent user base is key. This might be MessageMe's first messaging app but its team has plenty of experiencing building apps with critical appeal and critical mass.\nMuch of the team, including co-founder Arjun Sethi, got its start at Lolapps, a social gaming company that merged with a publisher in 2011. At Lolapps, Sethi oversaw hit Facebook games such as Ravenwood Fair and Ravensk City \u2014 games that amassed more than 50 million players.\n\nIn fact, when the MessageMe team started building an iOS and Android app back in April and May of 2012, the goal wasn't even to make a new messaging client. Instead, the idea for a messaging app evolved from user feedback and iterative testing.\n\"We realized that people tend to communicate using different mediums online,\" Sethi told me. \"The medium that users use \u2014 be it text or photos or drawings \u2014 ends up being more important than the platform that's being used.\" Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, \"the medium is the message.\"\nWhen I point out that quote to Sethi, he laughs. \"It's funny, we ran across that book after we had a high level idea of what MessageMe was all about and it really helped simplify our entire vision.\"\nFor Sethi, the key to making MessageMe different is that it makes it easy to add context to messages. Users don't just want to send text or even just photos, they want to be able to send YouTube videos or audio clips. Plus, MessageMe has a very slick \"doodle\" tool that makes it easy to create doodles or image annotations on the fly. Users can even doodle on top of a photo that another user sends them, instantly adding a remixable layer to the app.\nOne of my favorite features of the app is the ability to share location. You can do this with WhatsApp, but it doesn't tie into Foursquare's location database the same way MessageMe does. Sharing a location is such a common activity, especially amongst group messages, that it's really great to see it in the context of other text and chats.\nThe Gamification of Messaging\n\nGiven the team's background in social gaming, I asked Sethi what impact that had on how MessageMe was created. The answer was insightful.\n\"The behavioral aspect of games was the most important takeaway. Users create their own messaging motifs and mediums within games to communicate. In Farmville, users used to leave messages on their farms to communicate with one another and this led to the concept of 'gifting' items. We saw that in social or free-to-play games, it was very common for users to want to customize and differentiate their world as well as the way they communicated with others.\"\nThus, for MessageMe, the goal was to look at the ways that users choose to interact and how it becomes \"sticky\" and build those features into an app. In other words, the same way that a social game company wants to make sure that a game is progressively improving in quality so that users will return, the goal with MessageMe is to make the experience a notch above any other platform to keep users engaged and using it.\nSocial gaming hasn't just influenced the behavioral design of the app, it's also opens up potential business models. Sethi told me that the company is completely uninterested in doing advertising. \"That's not a business we're interested in being in,\" he said.\nInstead, the company is considering taking the in-app purchase motif of social games and building it into MessageMe. For example, users could pay to unlock an additional way to share or message with other users. Maybe paying $0.99 would allow users to share animated Vine-like GIFs with their friends \u2014 or it would give users access to premium filters for their photos.\nWith enough critical mass, even a small percentage of conversions could bring in bid dollars.\nIs There Room For Another Messaging App? Yes\nI'll be honest \u2014 I'd almost written off the group and individual messaging space. Between iChat, Facebook Messenger, GroupMe and WhatsApp, it really felt like the space was overly full. In fact, just today, I setup a GroupMe for our editorial team at SXSW.\nAfter using MessageMe, however, I'm willing to concede that this is a market that still has room to iterate and grow. The simple ability to seamlessly add in a YouTube video one of my favorite clips from the TV show Scrubs in a conversation about Rap Genius, was enough to turn my mind around about the entire concept.\nWe're still going to use GroupMe for editorial SXSW chatter \u2014 it's easy and conducive to getting info in a timely matter \u2014 but I also plan on trying to get as many friends on MessageMe as I can. \nThe idea of context-based messaging is very appealing and with more refinement and more messaging types, I can really see this taking off. \nMessageMe is available now. Let us know what you think of this take on messaging in the comments.\nImages courtesy of MessageMe, composites by Christina Warren, Mashable"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/messageme/>