The service made its debut on August 1, 2005

Jul 28, 2015 21:29 GMT  ·  By

About 10 years ago BlackBerry launched a small application called BBM. It was originally planned to be part of the BES 4.1 release, but after some thinking, the Canadian company decided to launch BlackBerry Messenger a bit earlier.

The artisan of the instant messenger is Gary Klassen, who was nervously sitting at his desk on the day of BBM's release, watching as thousands of people were downloading version 1.0 of the application.

BBM was initially named QuickMessenger and got a bit of a head start before being released to the public, as employees began sharing the beta internally at Research in Motion (RIM) before its official debut. So, BBM had quite a few users even before it made it to the general public.

Speaking of names, the application's name was given by Jeremy Kettle during an early meeting. For those unaware, the name BBM was also added to the English Collins Dictionary in 2012.

“We were experimenting with various instant messaging ideas. We discovered that if we took the existing PIN to PIN solution, and wrapped it in a nice GUI (Graphical user interface), we had a great product,” explains Jonathan Nobles, first product manager for BBM in 2005.

BBM is now one of the most popular instant messengers

In the last couple of years, BBM made its way to more and more mobile platforms and is now available on Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

Due to the speed at which messages were sent, low cost and low bandwidth, BBM was an instant success for BlackBerry and is now one of the most popular cross-platform instant messengers.

“BBM was the first form of text communication that was instant, cross-carrier, and mobile, in a time when people were still attached to their PCs.

“With desktop IM’s, you could show up as ‘online’, but you might not be at your computer. BBM was the first to be always with you, and you were truly always ‘online’,” added the inventor of BBM, Gary Klassen.

On August 1, 2015, BBM turns 10, so we wish BlackBerry happy birthday and at least another 10 years of major achievements in the communication industry.