WeChat - Mobile Social Messaging App

Today, I will be blogging about my experience with WeChat - the highly popular Social Messaging mobile app. This completely free app has been developed by Tencent (the largest internet company in APAC). WeChat which was launched in Oct 2011 already boasts of 300 million registered users worldwide.

Here in India, there was a lot of buzz about this app on Twitter and Facebook since March 2012. Few of my friends were using WeChat and they made me jump the bandwagon. This app was making ground in India back then, so I had a handful of people in my WeChat contacts. This means that there were very few people to chat with and this made me think that WeChat is just another app. I mistook this app to be an alternative to Whatsapp, but I was so wrong. Whatsapp sticks only to mobile contacts, but WeChat goes beyond mobile contacts and lets you make new friends. WeChat has been a feature rich app from Day 1. There is lot to explore in the app and since the product is being improved, one can expect many new features in the future versions of WeChat. Sometimes, I feel that it is a parallel social networking platform like facebook.

Official Website of WeChat : http://www.wechat.com/en/

WeChat is available over 5 mobile OS platforms currently - iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows & Blackberry.

Just Visit this URL from your phone to download WeChat - http://www.wechat.com/en/download.html

Now, I will quickly walk through the various features and offerings of WeChat. All of these are completely free and the app maker does not charge us at all.

• One-on-one Text Chat (Instant Messaging)
• Voice Chat (Push-to-talk)
• Video Chat/Calling
• Audio Calling
• Send emoticons, custom emoticons, images, videos and location to WeChat Contacts
• Group Chat
• Broadcast message to several friends at once
• Support for 17 languages
• Inbuilt mini game (Rock paper Scissors)
• Location based friend-discovery
• Supports Social Networking via shared streaming content feeds

So, we have a complete multimedia communication facility and that too free without any ads whatsoever.

As I had mentioned above, WeChat lets you befriend people apart from your mobile contacts. One can get social by using ' Shake ' & ' Look Around ' features. There is another feature known as ' Drift Bottle ' which helps us greet new friends using audio. So, these are the three features that help a WeChat user discover and connect with new WeChat users.

Getting social implies, not restricting ourselves to our friends and connecting with new people. And WeChat helps us achieve this, hence it is not just a messaging app but also a secure and robust social networking platform.

So, I end the introduction of WeChat here. I have written separate blog post wherein we will delve deeper into the app and explore the various features. Here is the link to it --> App Walkthrough