Who Will Own The Next Great Instant Messaging Service?
The social media era was about what we make public. Now, it's about what we don't. The race to own the next great back channel. — Instant messaging is the center of the internet. Everything else is a temporary distraction.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands a week after Gigaom reported that Instagram's next big thing might be messaging rather than photos, and it generalizes that signal into a thesis: the public-feed era of social media is giving way to a contest over private, one-to-one and small-group conversation — what BuzzFeed calls the 'back channel.' The argument traveled widely, with same-day syndication on TechCrunch and Business Insider signaling that platform watchers saw ownership of messaging as an open question rather than settled territory.
The framing also has a longer lineage in the corpus: back in January 2008, TechCrunch covered Social.im, an instant messaging client built around Facebook, evidence that entrepreneurs have long treated messaging as the connective tissue worth wrapping products around. What changed by late 2013 is scale — mobile-first messaging apps with hundreds of millions of users made the prize big enough that every major social platform had to answer the question of who owns the channel where users actually talk.
First-order effects
- Every major social platform now faces direct pressure to ship or deepen private messaging — Instagram's rumored messaging push being the concrete case — because the article argues attention is migrating from public feeds to private threads.
- Sharing behavior shifts toward closed channels, which immediately degrades the public-facing engagement signals (likes, reshares, follower counts) that both platforms and their advertiser customers use to measure social reach.
Second-order effects
- Platforms that built their value on public broadcasting — and the analytics and ad-targeting businesses layered on top of public graphs — must rebuild measurement and monetization for conversations they cannot observe.
- Messaging-first apps gain leverage over the incumbents: if the back channel becomes the default place people share, the feed-centric networks risk becoming the secondary surface, forcing feature catch-up across the whole social stack.
Third-order effects
- If conversation keeps consolidating inside a few closed messaging networks, distribution power migrates from the open web — where any publisher could reach a page — to whichever companies own the messaging graph, making them gatekeepers for everything from media to commerce.
- The pattern points toward messaging evolving beyond communication into a platform layer itself — payments, services, and content distributed through chat — with regulators and competitors eventually forced to treat a handful of messaging owners as critical infrastructure.
The trend: Social networking is pivoting from public broadcast feeds to privately owned messaging graphs, with the fight over who owns the back channel becoming the defining platform contest of the post-feed era.