Messaging is set to blow past social media as the dominant online media activity, according to recent data presented by Michael J. Wolf, founder and CEO of technology and strategy consulting firm Activate. Already, about 2.5 billion people use messaging apps (a number that’s set to hit 3.6 billion by 2018). WhatsApp alone has a user base of over 800 million, while Facebook’s Messenger and Tencent’s WeChat have attracted over 800 million and one billion users per month, respectively
But messaging technologies aren’t just expanding in scale. Much more than tools for free, instant exchanges with friends and colleagues, messaging apps are building platform layers to support new first- and third-party services, transforming them into hubs for everything from consuming content and playing games, to interacting and transacting with brands. Indeed, much of what users currently do on the web or with separate native apps — from buying a dress, to calling Uber, to personal banking — may soon be done in messaging apps, facilitated by sophisticated software-driven bots, which can complement interactions with human customer service agents.
