BeeTalk

» see beetalk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

From where I sat in 2014 the messenger question looked answered. Turkey had spent a decade on MSN and then moved to WhatsApp in more or less one motion, and once that happened nobody around me was auditioning alternatives. The idea that a serious chat war was still being fought somewhere, with billboards in one city and ten million signups in a season, would have surprised me. It was being fought in Bangkok and Taipei.

BeeTalk came out of Garena, the Singapore company that later became Sea Group and put its name on Free Fire and Shopee. The app launched in 2013 and reached ten million users inside four months, which is the number you get when a company with a games business already knows how to buy attention in a market. Thailand was the center of it. Taiwan added two million users in six weeks behind a campaign of Taipei billboards and celebrity endorsements.

The feature people remember is the shake. You shook the phone and it matched you with somebody else shaking theirs nearby, which was WeChat's trick before it was BeeTalk's. There was also a Look Around map showing strangers in walking distance and a doodle tool for sending drawings instead of typing. Stickers were everywhere, as they were in every asian messenger that year. It was a messenger the way Tinder is a messenger, which is to say the chat was the payoff and the meeting was the product.

I have no BeeTalk memory to offer. What it gives me instead is a correction to a map I was carrying, the one where a category gets decided once and then stays decided. That map described my own region and nothing beyond it.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

LINE had Thailand. It arrived from Japan in 2011, got there first, and by the middle of the decade it was less a messenger in Thailand than the phone's second operating system, with payments attached and a cast of cartoon characters people bought as physical merchandise. BeeTalk's answer was to be the app for the people you had not met yet.

That held until Tinder arrived properly in the region and did the same job with less pretense. BeeTalk was left competing with LINE on features it could not win and with Tinder on a purpose it had never fully admitted to. Garena had been running a second chat product in the same family called TalkTalk, and closed that one in september 2018. The order of the two closures reads like a company deciding it was a games business after all.

~ the day it died ~

The Live streaming feature went first. Then on 16 may 2019 a short notice appeared in thai saying the service would stop on 20 may, thanking users for their support, and four days later the app stopped working. There was no farewell post from Garena and no export of your conversations.

Garena kept growing. Sea Group listed in New York in 2017 and became one of the largest technology companies in southeast asia on the back of Free Fire and Shopee, while beetalk.com stopped resolving entirely. A messenger that reached ten million people in four months has left behind less searchable trace than most personal blogs from the same years, and almost none of what does survive is in english.

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