Today, after years of dwindling usage and financial woes from BlackBerry developer RIM, BlackBerry Messenger is going away for good.
BlackBerry Messenger (better known as BBM) was one of the first instant messaging (IM) platforms that arrived on mobile devices in 2005. People could choose to use a BBM account tied to their unique BlackBerry Pin rather than send a standard text message. BBM managed to take traditional desktop messaging and tr@nslate it to the tiny computers in our pockets. It was astounding.
It wasn’t perfect, though. BBM looked like an early version of Facebook’s WhatsApp. The text bubbles were cluttered, the user interface felt clunky when navigating between messages, and if the wheel on your BlackBerry got stuck, good luck scrolling through messages. Despite BBM’s weaknesses, it became the app that defined my early high school experience for two main reasons: group chats and a striking similarity to desktop IM platforms like AIM.
No one uses BlackBerry Messenger anymore, but it created the very foundation of how the world still communicates today.