BlackBerry Messenger: A trip through the Internet Time Machine

I don’t use a Black­berry. In spite of the cult of Black­berry, I’ve always found the device dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate. Even the new Pearl, with the cute scroll-wheel, is marred by the funky key­board lay­out. I just can’t get used to typ­ing on keys that have more than one char­ac­ter each.

Of course, as a new iPhone user, the Black­berry has drifted even fur­ther from my sphere of poten­tial use. Today, I got an email from a good friend who hap­pens to work at T-Mobile. It was an invi­ta­tion to join his Black­berry Mes­sen­ger con­tacts list (Mes­sen­ger is the soft­ware appli­ca­tion that pro­vides chat between Black­berry users).

First, I can’t use the soft­ware because I don’t have the device. To my knowl­edge, I can’t use the soft­ware on my desk­top machine either. Of course, I wouldn’t know the answer to that, thanks to my sec­ond problem.

Sec­ond, when you visit the Black­berry Mes­sen­ger down­load page, you’re greeted with this:

Notice

This web page uses ActiveX con­trols that work only in Microsoft Inter­net Explorer. To ensure that Black­Berry Mes­sen­ger is cor­rectly down­loaded to your Black­Berry, this site is not designed to work with any other Inter­net browsers. If you can­not use Inter­net Explorer, you may be able to down­load the soft­ware directly to your Black­Berry smartphone.

ActiveX? Seri­ously? I’m cer­tainly not a wiz­ard or code mon­key at the level of enter­prise devel­op­ers, but I have a really hard time believ­ing that an orga­ni­za­tion the likes of Research In Motion can’t fig­ure out a way for users to down­load their soft­ware in, say, Mozilla Firefox.

In this case, we have a les­son in inter­op­er­abil­ity of tech­nolo­gies. There is a grow­ing expec­ta­tion for users to have uni­ver­sal access to con­tent, and fewer excuses for devel­op­ers to deliver such. From a media per­spec­tive, the same holds: your view­ers, read­ers, lis­ten­ers, all expect to be able to con­sume your con­tent in a fash­ion that suites them, not you.

The answer to this is get­ting easer, and more com­pli­cated. For my clients, I tend to urge for the iTunes solu­tion for deliv­er­ing syn­di­cated con­tent, pod­casts, etc. It’s uni­ver­sal, cross-platform, and cer­tainly the biggest player in this nascent mar­ket. How­ever, it’s not that easy. There are dozens of smaller appli­ca­tions, many even more feature-rich than iTunes, not to men­tion web-based ser­vices deliv­er­ing the same func­tion­al­ity. How much more dif­fi­cult will this deci­sion be when Apple no longer owns this market?

The Black­berry solu­tion is a vic­tim of legacy, likely made in the hey­day of ActiveX. The result today is a site out-of-date, a vic­tim of top-shelfing.

It’s iPhone time, folks, and it will come to an end. How soon that will be depends on two factors:

1. How clever will Apple be in their on-going devel­op­ment of the platform?





2. How clever will other play­ers be in usurp­ing user expe­ri­ence from them?

For­get­ting to put old tech­nol­ogy in the bone yard is a sure fire way to rel­e­gate your solu­tion to sec­ond rate.