WeChat: The Social Optimiser!

Wechat is a free social application that should not be confused with a traditional messenger. When WeChat social app hit the Android market, no one knew the power of synchronizing networks, offering free cross platform connection, in just one application. At the time standalone applications like Viber, Whatsapp and Kik were very popular among the masses. Most people, myself included, dismissed the app as just another messenger but yet another look revealed something quite different and made me change my mind!

WeChat brings a subtle twist to the trend of messenger app unlike kik it does not require a kik-i.d. to be made solely for the app; viber and whatsapp use our phone numbers as an i.d.
but the end result is the same as there is no inter-connectivity amongst them. However wechat does not require this step, and we can just use our facebook i.d. to log in. It also has the more traditional wechat i.d. and phone number log-in (for traditional) as well.

Adding and maintaining friends:-

Using Wechat, adding friends becomes relatively easy as no more options, asking you to add your friends and filling in their details, will annoy us! You can easily add your friends from your Phone contacts, FaceBook lists and even find new ones using various innovative ways. I genuinely despise the method of adding friends used by both whatsapp and viber, in which we need to have the contact information of someone in our device contacts to have them recognized as Friends and Family by the applications. There is no way of searching friends what-so-ever which is utterly annoying! WeChat however is a different story; as we can add them from facebook or use the app’s own search feature to find their username just like facebook. I also really liked the two new features that wechat has introduced, one being the “scan QR code” option which is basically a two-dimensional matrix Barcode; readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and other smart phones. Your profile is offered a unique QR code which can be used to track your WeChat ID. Also; when used externally in websites and blogs, our readers/friends can just scan the QR code using a bar scanner and then connect with you seamlessly; VIOLA! This may seem useless to some people but hey, at least they are trying something new and I think in the long run when wechat becomes extremely popular this could be a useful little feature. The other feature is that it uses our phone's GPS to tell us if (and how many) other wechat users are near you so if a friend is near you, wechat will let you know; I guess you can call it location-based friend discovery which I think is a really handy feature of wechat. Both these new innovative features caught my eye and I really liked them. They are different from the same old boring contact list of the messengers like Viber, and Whatsapp.

Features:-

Developed by "Tencent", Wechat has all the features that you would find in any social messaging app. Video/Audio Calling, Push-to-Talk (PTT) Voice Messaging, Group Chat - text & voice (up to 40 people). It is the only free Social Messaging App to offer Video/Audio calling and voice messaging with more than 200 million users worldwide. It also has some pretty cool new features to play around with. Voice messaging in wechat has the same basic principle as whatsapp or any other messaging app but it is presented in a new and refreshing way, what Tencent experts have done is that they have used the voice massaging feature to turn your phone into a living “Walky Talky” where you press and hold the speak button and your message is simultaneously delivered and played on your chat partner’s phone which creates the pretty cool illusion of using a “walky talky”; making the whole experience really refreshing to use. Video and audio calling are pretty standard and similar to what we get in the much popular viber and whatsapp.


More Innovative ways to Attract New Friends:-

Moments: This one is similar to Facebook profiles with all the sophisticated sharing features it offers. Your happy moments can be shared through Photos or Videos among your friends. You can also have a cover photo for your profile just like Face Book does.

Shake (I found this one really cool): Shaking your mobile finds you friends. Yes, that is what this feature does. It can locate people even as far as 1000 KMs away in China, India or Portugal and all you have to do is shake you phones simultaneously.

Drift Bottle: This feature reminds me of that movie "Cast Away" in which tom hanks is stranded on a deserted island and writes messages into a bottle and throws it into the sea. This app does the same but with this virtual realism on the high. You write a message and throw it into the virtual sea and let someone new find it from the sea and reply to you (you do not necessarily have to be stranded on a deserted island by the way).

Conclusion:-

WeChat is a fun way to connect with your buddies and make some freshly invented new ones. It has a lot of innovative little features that I found myself playing with in my free time, (just like Lionel Messi does while using it; being its promoter) along with this it also provides all the features commonly found in any other messenger. In the end it is these extra little features that made me really like this app. Tencent have done a fine job at making a great social app and they were not scared to go the extra mile. If you are an uptight person and want simplicity in your messenger I recommend you stick with viber, but if you’re like me and love to try new things and want a fun and dynamic social messaging experience then WE'CHAT is definitely the app to have.