Google Messenger adds photo sharing to combine the two biggest trends in mobile apps

Sep 21, 2011 13:40 GMT  ·  By

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery they say. While some people may not agree with this, in the web and tech world, it's the reality, people build off of each other's ideas and products and the team that moves the fastest and adds the most new features or simply produces the best version of a feature that everyone else already has, wins.

This is even more poignant in the mobile web and app space, where everyone is trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Things move so fast on the web, especially on the mobile front, that you don't want to be left behind.

So, when someone has an idea that seems solid, you get to work building something similar.

The two latest and biggest trends, that greatly illustrate this, are photo sharing apps and group messaging apps.

It started with a few small companies coming out with innovative products, Instagram for example. Then everyone joined in.

Literally, everyone, if they didn't build their own apps, they bought companies that did it. Google, Facebook, Skype all of the big players and some smaller ones got in on the action.

Google came up with several photo sharing apps, which it killed, and several group messaging apps, of which only the Google+ related one is left.

Dubbed Google Huddle, it was a simple group messaging app like many others out there, but the Google+ integration and clean layout helped.

Still it wasn't enough to stand out so someone at Google had a brilliant idea, if photo sharing apps are great and group messaging apps are great than a group photo message sharing app should be the Holy Grail of mobile applications.

Thus, the latest Google Huddle was born that, on top of the messaging features, adds, well, photos.

Except it's not called Huddle anymore, since there was already an app called Huddle which, you guessed it, also includes group messaging features.

So Google renamed it to Google+ Messenger to avoid any confusion with the existing application. Google may or may not have been ironic with the name change, but the choice is funny to say the least.

You see, Facebook also has a group messaging app. In fact, it's the only other mobile app that the social network offers besides the eponymous Facebook app, so it's pretty special.

Guess what it's called? Well, maybe you know already so you don't have to guess, yes it's Facebook Messenger. Subtle, Google is not.

That said, Facebook is not exactly an innovator itself, not only is the name old, remember Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and so on.

Well, in the end, it doesn't really matter what it's called. Shakespeare's Juliet famously asked "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet."

"As we move from limited field trial to open beta, we’re renaming Huddle to Messenger. More importantly, we’re adding new functionality to Messenger that makes group communication even more fun: photo sharing," Punit Soni, Google+ Mobile product manager, wrote.