BlackBerry Messenger

» see blackberry.com/bbm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

BBM came pre-installed on every blackberry phone starting around 2005. you could only message other blackberry users. each person had a unique 8-character PIN. you exchanged PINs to add each other. messages went over blackberry's own network, separately from SMS, with delivery and read receipts (the famous R / D ticks).

for a few years in the late 2000s, having a BBM PIN was a low-grade status symbol. blackberry was the corporate phone. people who used BBM had blackberries, which meant they had work that paid for blackberries. the white-collar audience in north america and europe used it heavily from about 2008 to 2011.

then the iphone happened. then whatsapp. by 2013 BBM was already in steep decline as a messaging product, even though blackberry expanded it to ios and android in october 2013 in an attempt to recover. it kept its strongest hold in indonesia and nigeria for several more years. blackberry killed the consumer service on 31 may 2019.

~ the dossier ~

~ the PIN ~

your BBM identity was a PIN. it was an 8-character code that uniquely identified you on the blackberry network. you exchanged PINs in person, on business cards, on email signatures. there was no phone number lookup. you had to actually trade PINs to add each other.

this was meaningful. PINs were friction. you would not give your PIN to a stranger. so your BBM contact list was a curated, deliberate, mostly-professional set of people. it was the opposite of whatsapp's "everyone in your phone book is automatically there" model. BBM had high social bandwidth because it had high signup friction.

in indonesia, sharing your BBM PIN remained a normal way to identify yourself well into the late 2010s. business cards in jakarta in 2014 still had BBM PINs printed on them next to phone numbers. the platform's death was a real loss for the indonesian professional class.

~ the R and D ticks ~

BBM had two distinct delivery indicators. R meant the message had been delivered to the recipient's device. D (sometimes shown as a different mark) meant the recipient had opened the message and seen it. these were always visible. there was no setting to turn them off.

this caused a lot of social anxiety. if someone had R'd your message but not responded for hours, you knew they had read it and chosen not to reply. there was no plausible deniability. modern messengers have read receipts but most of them let you turn the feature off. BBM never did. the strictness was part of the product's identity.

BBM also had typing indicators that showed when the other person was composing a message. you could watch them type, pause, type, pause, eventually send. for serious conversations this was useful. for casual ones it was distracting. all of these features ended up in modern messengers, often with toggles that BBM never offered.

~ the curtain ~

the iphone in 2007 and android in 2008 ended blackberry's hardware moment. it took a few years to fully play out, but by 2012 blackberry phones were no longer the corporate default. without blackberry hardware in pockets, BBM lost its captive audience in north america and europe.

blackberry tried to save BBM by releasing it on ios and android in 2013. the launch was a disaster. the apps could not handle the load. user signup was rolled back. when it eventually got fixed, the audience had already moved to whatsapp and imessage. BBM on ios was a small product that never had momentum.

indonesia and nigeria were the holdout markets. blackberry had targeted these markets specifically with low-cost devices and BBM service plans, and the audience there was sticky. but even there, whatsapp eventually took over. blackberry announced the consumer BBM shutdown in april 2019. the service ended on 31 may 2019.

~ what we lost ~

the curated contact list. modern messengers automatically add everyone in your phone book. BBM made you trade PINs. the result was a smaller, more deliberate friend list. you had to choose who got your PIN. that choice gave the contact list more weight.

the corporate-network messenger. BBM was the messenger of corporate professionals. that audience moved to whatsapp and slack, but the cohesion is different now. BBM was small, professional, and used by everyone in your industry. nothing has the same shape now.

the read-receipt tyranny. BBM's strict R / D model created social pressure modern apps deliberately avoid. modern messengers usually let you disable read receipts. BBM never did. that absoluteness produced specific social conventions ("i will reply within 24 hours of R, you will not assume i am ignoring you") that are gone now.

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