The Real Hook is What's Coming

I saw this Wall Street Journal story while in New Orleans at the NCS4 Conference. Yep, if Blackberry has a killer app that has kept it alive, it is the private messenger function and the ability to make your own special groups.

Amateur radio types will get the reference: you can have your own text nets.

But WSJ details how GroupMe is providing that today for Android. What isn't really clear from the Journal -- and is on GroupMe's website -- is they have an iOS app today. Still, the doomsday line in the story is this: iMessage is due via Apple as a part of the operating system in the fall.

If Steve Jobs can make his peace with Adobe over Flash -- or the rest of the world hurries up and gets HTML5 and true H.264 across the board -- there will be little need for any other space than iOS for a while.