We are all schizophrenic

In recent years, we saw the incredible rise of Whatsapp and many different type of communication services. While communicating might seems like a “solved” problem, it is not: there are always new needs and new generations (please don’t let me talk about Millennials, it’s a millennium old definition) to deal with. As this is so common nowadays, when I was just a bit older than a child, the most popular form of communication were SMS messages. If you wanted to communicate with someone you were constrained by these expensive 160 character long pieces of text. This era lasted for several years. In the meantime, the internet started getting real. IRC was already getting old, ICQ was popular, and then was the time of Windows Messenger, Skype, GTalk and so on. During that period, I was a Pentium 4 owner, a teenager, cellphones were still dumb and SMS were still there. I still remember forcing my girlfriend to change network operator to profit from the same company discounts for SMS. Growing up I started realising that while I was using IRC and Windows messenger as the main tools to communicate on my computer, there were parts of the world using totally different tools. Skype was not popular here, GTalk was totally not. Windows messenger was the most popular solution and I was forced to use it to communicate with my friends even if I was a GNU/Linux user at the time.

Years after, the iPhone changed the world with the App Store. It was an incredible opportunity for developers and it helped create many many new apps to talk with others, each with its own characteristic.

While all of this might seem obvious, this intro was necessary to introduce what we as users are asking for today: now that we somehow integrated the world of internet chats with mobile phones, people around the world are finally hoping to have a single app to manage all the different apps we have on our phones. I heard it at conferences, I read articles on the web about it. I saw people effectively trying to build apps to rule them all, trying to impose their app as the leading one.

You know what? This is not gonna happen. Ever. And you know why? Because these apps with their own peculiarities are allowing us to be different persons with different individuals. Whatsapp allowed us to send tons of text and tons of emoticons. GTalk/Hangouts allows me to write using both my mac and my phone. Do you believe I am the same person when I write on my mac and when I do it on my phone? No, I’m not. I’m not the same person when I’m writing a mail to my boss or to my father. And I’m not the same person on IRC talking with nerds. This is a fact and it is definitely not going to change. We are made of different identities and we love different apps because this allows us to do that. If there will ever be an app that is gonna successfully aggregate different services, it will have to deal with the fact that we have multiple identities.

So, for the moment, keep calm, press your multitask button and enjoy your schizophrenia.