MessageMe was a messaging app and platform for the iPhone and

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

. It launched in March 2013 and grew to 5 million users within 3 months. The app allowed users to send and receive videos, photos,

stickers A sticker is a type of label: a piece of printed paper, plastic, vinyl, or other material with temporary or permanent pressure sensitive adhesive on one side. It can be used for decoration or for functional purposes, depending on the situation. ...

, and voice messages in addition to text. MessageMe was acquired and shutdown by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

in 2014 for a price rumored between $30 million and $40 million.

History

MessageMe was founded in 2012 in by Arjun Sethi, Alexander Chee, Justin Rosenthal and Vivek Tatineni and based out of

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. It raised a $1.9 million seed round from

First Round Capital First Round is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan First Round typically provides seed-stage funding and focuses on portfolio companies ...

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SV Angel Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist and philanthropist. He has been described as one of Silicon Valley's "super angels". Early career Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's de ...

and

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen H ...

, among others. It launched in March 2013 on iOS and

and reached 1 million users within 10 days. In May 2013, MessageMe announced that it raised an additional $10 million in funding from

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as wel ...

and that Greylock partner John Lilly had joined the board of directors. MessageMe reached 5 million users within 75 days of launch.

Controversy

Shortly after MessageMe's March 2013 launch,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

revoked MessageMe's access to the

Facebook Platform The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Faceb ...

's "Find Friends" functionality that allowed MessageMe users to connect to Facebook and find their Facebook friends on MessageMe. Facebook cited its policy that allowed it to revoke access to developers who "replicate[] a core Facebook product or service without [Facebook's] permission." Leaked internal discussions showed that Facebook revoked MessageMe's access over concern that MessageMe was becoming too popular and competitive with Facebook messaging. In an internal March 2013 email thread, Justin Osofsky, former Facebook director of platform partnerships, wrote: In 2018, the question of Facebook's use of platform data in anticompetitive ways against companies like MessageMe,

Vine A vine ( Latin ''vīnea'' "grapevine", "vineyard", from ''vīnum'' "wine") is any plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent (that is, climbing) stems, lianas or runners. The word ''vine'' can also refer to such stems or runners thems ...

and Voxer resurfaced as part of the

Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising. The data was collected through an app c ...

. At the same time that Facebook cut off data to apps like MessageMe, it shared private user data with important Facebook partners like

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a ...

and

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...

. In December 2018, Facebook officially ended the platform policy it used to revoke MessageMe's platform access.

Features

MessageMe along with

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows user ...

Kik KiK, legally ''KiK Textilien und Non-Food GmbH'', is a German clothing discount store chain headquartered in Bönen. Overview KiK was founded in 1994 by Stefan Heinig and the holding company Tengelmann Group. ''KiK'' is an acronym for ( en, T ...

and others led the movement of mobile messaging in the United States away from text-based

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

and towards richer text messaging which included audio, video, doodles, stickers, location and more in addition to text. Global startups that led this trend included

WeChat WeChat () is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has be ...

in China,

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in Japan, and

KakaoTalk KakaoTalk (Hangul: 카카오톡), commonly referred to as KaTalk (Hangul: 카톡) in South Korea, is a mobile messaging app for smartphones operated by Kakao Corporation. It was launched on March 18, 2010, and it is available on mobile and deskto ...

in Korea.

Messaging apps Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigg ...

like MessageMe,

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and Lango were the first to bring

to the United States mobile messaging market.

's success with stickers in Asia inspired those apps to bring stickers to the United States. MessageMe offered free and paid sticker packs that could be purchased through the app.

Acquisition

Yahoo acquired MessageMe for between $30 million and $40 million in October 2014. Other potential acquirers were

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before th ...

and Truecaller. The acquisition happened as part of CEO

Marissa Mayer Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contacts. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a ...

's strategy of reinvigorating legacy products by acquiring top startup talent via small acquisitions. Yahoo bought startups like MessageMe, shut down their products and then put those teams to work on existing or new Yahoo products.Yahoo’s Other Challenge: Retaining Acquired Talent
/ref> In July 2015, Yahoo launched its first mobile messaging app, Livetext, which was built internally by the MessageMe team on top of MessageMe technology. Yahoo shut down Livetext in March 2016.

References

{{reflist Discontinued software IOS software Android (operating system) software Yahoo! acquisitions Internet properties established in 2012 Instant messaging Instant messaging clients