Chat Multi-Tasking Is How Facebook Home Could Rattle Apple And Google
Innovation doesn’t need to hit you over the head. It just has to solve a problem in a new way. Until now, a real hinderance to text messaging on mobile was context switching. You were either communicating with someone, or you were in another app. ‘Or’. Not ‘And’. What Android and iOS call “multi-tasking” is really just more rapid switching. Even with pop-over notifications, you still had to leave one app and open another to respond. That moment you see your current activity fade to black and a messaging app ascend to replace it causes a mental break.
This context switching is unnatural and unhelpful. Often we are communicating about what we’re computing — giving someone the answer to a question, making a joint decision, guiding someone to a destination, or discussing a piece of content found online. I’ve definitely had to go back and forth multiple times in frustration between SMS or Facebook Messenger and other apps when I couldn’t remember a set of directions or other complicated string of information I was trying to pass to a friend. The best option was to carry on a voice call over speakerphone as you navigate around the phone, and some connection types don’t even support this.
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