Once upon a time, Yahoo Messenger was mighty. But a decade ago, it faded into obscurity alongside Kazaa and yelling "Wazzzaaap!" when you answered the phone. Now, however, the company is back with a decidedly modern take on mobile messaging. It's called Livetext, and the easiest way to describe it is as the silent movie of video messaging.
When you open the Livetext app—for Android and iOS—you're shown a list of all your friends on the service. Tap on one, and you see a message window underneath a live video stream of your face. On the other end, the person whose face you've tapped on gets a notification that you've begun typing. As soon as you hit the first key, they're invited to the conversation. If they join, you'll see their face as they type. You can send messages, emoji, whatever you normally send in texts—the only difference now is you can see them while you do. There's only one catch: You can't talk to them.
The big, slap-the-forehead, "of course!" moment for Yahoo came from a counterintuitive idea: The problem with video chat isn't the video, it's the audio. "It’s actually the audio that makes it a very different and all-consuming forms of communication," Yahoo SVP of mobile and emerging products Adam Cahan says. That's the big difference between Livetext and, say, Snapchat's video chat service. Both are a nice medium between phone call and voicemail; if you're here, great, if not, I can leave a message.
The beauty of Livetext's vow of silence, Cahan continues, is that it means you can open the app anywhere: in a concert, in class, in a meeting. "I don’t care if I’m anywhere, because you get that sense of it’s just an instantaneous experience." So much of the app's development, he says, was in making everything fast and simple enough that you didn't have time to worry about how you looked or where you were. And when you're done talking, just leave the room. Nothing gets saved or shared.
When Yahoo was looking into building another messenger app, they decided to try and split the difference between appointment messaging, like phone calls and video chats, and totally asynchronous things like texting. The goal: to give people a way to feel more connected, to get more information than just words in a green bubble, without it feeling interruptive or complicated.
Cahan draws a parallel to the indicator on the iPhone that someone is typing–the three glowing dots before the message appears. He loves that thing. "You’re like okay wait," he says, "there’s actually someone there. We’re actually connecting." Or consider the green dot in IM clients of yore, which sent the same signal. Call it Active Messaging: We're still just texting, but I know you're there reading it. Somehow, that changes the way it feels.
The Livetext team, led by Arjun Sethi, a product manager who came to Yahoo when it acquired MessageMe in 2014, has been testing the app constantly—first in private user tests, and most recently, publicly in Hong Kong. Sethi says it always goes the same way: "There’s an immediate reaction to it, which is, 'This is weird.'" That was certainly my own initial reaction. You may not be able to talk or hear, but there's still something pretty disconcerting about opening an IM window and suddenly seeing your face. Or, if you hold your phone like a normal person, the underside of your chin. So I held it up awkwardly in front of my face, and looked for my best angle. I feel the need to say bye in every message, and laugh uproariously at everyone's jokes because just typing LOL won't do me any good when my friends can see I didn't actually LOL. Livetext doesn't feel less like a performance to me; it feels worse, like a performance I forgot was today and am suddenly thrust on stage for.
Sethi says that'll change. That everyone experiences this. That having someone else around actually made everything go quicker, because thumbs-up emojis could be replaced by actual thumbs actually up, and conversations can be shorter and more because I don't have to type "..." or "haha." I can just make faces. Younger users tend to pick it up even faster, he says. "They felt it was easier, faster, and they were able to connect in ways they just couldn’t before... It ended up being so frequent and so fast, they saw their friends for two minutes, [or] 20 seconds."
Livetext isn't a would-be Facebook Messenger/Hangouts/Whatsapp/Kik/Line killer. Yahoo's not trying to dominate all your time, or pull you away from other services. It's not even really a messaging service. If it catches on—and that's not a given for any messaging app, particularly one this different—it'll be as a way to quickly check in on somebody, to see what they're up to while they're reading your text. Just a fast, easy check in, with emoji to boot.
And then, just as easily, they can put the phone back down. No TTYL necessary.
