BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) Messenger will complete ten years of existence on August 1, 2015. It was initially intended to be the part of the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) 4.1 release. The beta version of the product was given out to the employees at Research in Motion, currently known as BlackBerry. Hence, Blackberry messenger had a healthy community of users before its official release.
Currently, new features have propelled BBM to a level unimaginable when it was first released. BBM has transformed into a social media platform, a medium for gaming, mobile advertising, and other kinds of commerce. The service is designed for enterprises and has a very high level of security.
There was a consistent and constant increase of speed with which messages were dispatched, delivered and read in the product. BBM was one among the initial over-the-app (OTA) apps for BlackBerry smartphones.
Very few people were responsible for the development of the first version of BBM. The initial name was QuickMessenger until Jeremy Kettle came up with the name BBM (BlackBerry Messenger).
The first product manager of BBM was Jonathan Nobles. He was surprised when told that BBM had completed a decade of operations. He recalled that their team was playing around with different instant messaging ideas. Eventually, they found out that if the existing PIN to PIN solution was taken and encapsulated in a GUI (Graphical User Interface), it resulted in a great product.
The inventor of BBM, Gary Klassen, concurred saying that PIN to PIN messaging always had ‘Delivered’ and ‘Read’ status updates. These updates showed when message were delivered and read by users. However, they were not enabled by default. Turning on this feature was a pioneering idea that gave a sense of real time communication.
BBM delivered the pioneering text communication that was immediate, cross-carrier and mobile. BlackBerry’s success was because of reasonable cost, low bandwidth, and instant delivery.
