Kik, the under-the-radar messaging service, recently announced they have crested 100 million users. The Canadian company likes to remain quiet, but this was just too big to pass up. CEO Ted Livingston, a 26 year old former employee of Blackberry, noted his PR team pushed hi to make the announcement.
With 100 million downloads, Kik is believed to be bigger than the much ballyhooed Snapchat, and certainly has a bigger footprint that the likes of Instagram. Kik also gives a true all-in-one chatting experience. GIFs can be embedded, and there is a dedicated YouTube search button. Its simple interface is a winning fans over, too.
Fun features like a My Little Pony sticker pack belie the serious history Kik has. In 2010, a lawsuit from Blackberry nearly shut Kik down, which caused their CEO Livingston to take a quieter approach for both day-to-day business and broader announcements. The service also differentiates itself by using your Kik username (rather than your number) to identify you, making it very secure.
With an eye on the future, all the features we mentioned before — like YouTube search — is made with HTML5, the now-standard web markup language. By adopting a nimble language that is focussed on the web, Kik can remain poignant for a long time. Their average score of 4.4 stars in the Play Store on the back of over 350,000 reviews only suggests their on the right path.
Wow, 100M and still counting..
From what I’ve seen, Kik is mostly used for persistent rich private messaging between parties who don’t know each other in real life. Its growth is likely to be stunted with Twitter and Instagram’s expanded and new – respectively – direct messaging capabilities.