
Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime - doener
http://www.aftvnews.com/amazon-possibly-working-on-new-stand-alone-messaging-app-called-anytime/
======
ice109
why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what
the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that
useful for training deep nets or something?

~~~
hooluupig
If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the
answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay
instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news
sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing
almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies
in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried several times to make a successful
messaging platform but fails repeatedly(just like Google's messaging mess). If
facebook move in WeChat's direction,it will be a huge threat to amazon.Please
excuse for my bad English as i am not a native speaker.

~~~
astebbin
Can Facebook and other US tech companies move in WeChat's direction
successfully, in the West? Why did WeChat take off as such an everything-
application in China? Do the same necessary motivations and trends exist
elsewhere?

I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different
types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which
are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally -
or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled
gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of
getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and
checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much
hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at
least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me
locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari.

Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to
penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and
so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps.
Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?

------
zanny
"Everything you've wanted in a messaging app"

Matrix support and total federation integration.

~~~
tomjen3
Everything I wanted is one messaging app where everybody is on, where no data
or meta data can ever be shared and which is run by human rights activists.

This, I guess, ain't it.

------
satysin
I just want a widely used messaging platform that isn't owned by Facebook
(Messenger and WhatsApp).

Sadly Microsoft and Google seem incapable of doing it.

------
seibelj
But everyone I know just switched over to Google Allo! We all have to switch
again? /s

------
skibob1027
I think viewing this a just another instant messaging walled garden is short
sighted. This appears to be the digital portion of Amazon's attempt to
displace and disrupt the US mail system. Messaging/voice/video provide a
secure digital communications backbone to every Amazon account, much like
iMessage does for Apple IDs.

As Amazon operationalizes its own physical delivery network (planes, trucks,
drones), the USPS is going to be demolished and postal rates will rise
dramatically. Amazon accounts link every user one or more physical addresses.
Anytime will also link those users to a secure digital "address" appropriate
for delivery of sensitive information like financial and medical records.

With this hub in place, Amazon can act as a clearinghouse to functionally
displace the physical mail system in the US and throughout the world. Most of
what arrives in your mailbox would be more efficiently and securely delivered
electronically, but to date there has been no centralized platform to
digitally mail items so every bank/medical practice/company has had to create
its own internal secure messaging system or rely on email.

Amazon Anywhere can act as the pre-scaled missing link to solve his problem
while creating additional benefits to Amazon by functionally requiring anyone
without an Amazon account to get one to receive secure communications in the
future. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed as an IM or video call platform
in order to fulfill this role.

------
eswat
Wish we would get out of this red ocean of competing messaging platforms and
head towards something more open, like XMPP (at least Slack works dandy with
that) or even how email and the internet in general works.

I have five messaging applications on my phone already and there is nothing
critical on these platforms that couldn’t be handled by a single, polyglot
client.

~~~
_pmf_
That's what Matrix tried to solve.

Yeah, it went exactly as everyone expected.

------
adamnemecek
Amazon should stick to what they are good at and stop releasing these also-ran
products.

~~~
gtCameron
What they are good at is trying a shit ton of ideas and then optimizing and
doubling down on the winners. If they just "stuck to what they are good at"
they would still be a small online bookstore.

~~~
dman
The issue is that they are slipping on things they used to be good at. They
are a lousy bookstore now and even the general retail experience has seriously
regressed.

~~~
iamdave
Legitimately curious, but what about them is objectively "lousy"? ANECDOTE
ALERT: I love how easy it is to buy a book from them, my new James Baldwin
novel went from "read a review on another site, found it on amazon, ordered"
in about 3 minutes, and the book itself arrived a day and a half later.

~~~
dman
Carmack has a good recent example so I will defer to him for an example -
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/886229891720630272](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/886229891720630272)

I would expect a store of Amazons scale to do a far better job of categorising
and searching information than what they offer right now. Also discovery of
new books is very suboptimal in my opinion.

~~~
riffraff
What results do you get for that search? The first and most are actually about
video codecs for me. Then you have the weird erotic fiction, but restricting
the search to "video engineering" is 2 clicks away on my phone, 1 on desktop.

------
mxuribe
This is annoying for all the reasons typically cited...but what if amazon (or
someone big like amazon) actually dove full-head into leveraging/supporting
the matrix protocol as the foundation of their messaging product/service? And
before anyone replies with "but then amazon wouldn't get their intended walled
garden/controlled silo"...i beg you to ponder the notion that amazon has AWS -
basically servers/services for hire - but that didn't stop microsoft, google,
etc. from starting competing (similar) services. Imagine a future where amazon
creates "chat as a service" based on matrix. Sure some firms/individuals won't
need more than their own self-hosted instance...but enterprises - already
experienced with aws - can add on pro hosted chat (a la matrix protocol).
Amazon could even contribute to the mattrix project, even if only to feel like
they're helping to steer the software updates to benefit their company.
Overall everyone wins:

* Amazon doesn't need to develop a new chat system from scratch.

* They can make plenty of money hosting matrix instance servers for private individuals and more importantly enterprises (read: cha-ching!).

* By contributing to matrix project, amazon can "feel good" about to contributing to open source.

* Amazon gets free on-boarding of potential new customers. Use-case: small business sets up their own matrix instance...eventually outgrows that, then turns to AWS, and voila, they migrate their instance to the official/supported AWS matrix instances.

* If matrix - like email - were to eventually become a more widespread de facto messaging/chat protocl, AWS would be leagues ahead of other competitors.

* There is also incentive for the competion (microsoft, google), if Amazon starts this, because like AWS, the others would compete with their own chat/messaging platforms, but enterprise customers would have an easier migration curve - because all chat/messaging would be based on matrix...not unlike email platform migrations today.

Maybe my thoughts above are pipe dreaMS...but beyond the feel good aspects, i
firmly believe there are possibilities for businesses to make good amounts of
money in this space...and all due to a very good default protocol.

------
hydandata
Every sufficiently proficient programmer will eventually write their own text
editor, Every sufficiently large enterprise will eventually write its own
messaging app.

------
cptskippy
It annoys me that everyone wants you to play inside their walled garden. It's
especially annoying with all of these smart speakers that function perfectly
fine as Bluetooth speakerphones.

I would much rather they augment my existing phone service.

~~~
mc32
There was a time aol, yahoo and msn were made to play nice and interop, will
that soon be the case with these new messaging platforms?

~~~
Jtsummers
As I recall, that was a very brief period and then they all went their own
ways again with an arms race to prevent people from connecting to their
networks without the official clients.

Google used XMPP initially with Google Talk, but then turned off federation
(was it ever on? I recall it was, but that was a long time ago).

We've had greater than a decade now of poor interop between messaging
platforms. This is unlikely to change as long as these platforms are owned by
people with a vested interest in controlling the experience (tying it to their
hardware or other services or ad networks, primarily).

~~~
dboreham
Federation did work. I had it configured on our server.

------
libeclipse
Anyone wanna take the bet that this will follow the same path their phone did?

------
hashkb
When will it be available? Anytime soon?

