LiveShare Pivots from Photostream Apps to Messenger

We received information that LiveShare that was previously loaded as a photostream application has changed its model into messenger application. This change is surprising because the last news we heard was that LiveShare has around 4,2 million users worldwide. This amount is far more than Path’s users. Cooliris as LiveShare creator is already has an office in Singapore and had plans to bring this application to Indonesia – by working with Elasitas as local partner.

Area Messenger, which became the new target of LiveShare is also a big question mark. In this segment, WhatsApp as the most popular hegemony is hard to rocked, although there are many players in this segment. Although offered for free, of course LiveShare must answer the question: can they guarantee the reliability as SMS replacement messaging platform?

I personally have tried LiveShare and quite impressed with the beauty of the interface it has to offer. There are three advantages of LiveShare that WhatsApp does not own. First, LiveShare allows us to post umages and share them with other users without it be downloaded by other user first. It’s just like uploading photos to Facebook.

Secondly, the model of group its own is much like iMessage where we can add people to follow the conversation (as many people as possible) with no limit to the number of members just like in BBGroups or WhatsApp. But this kind of group has a loss, in which we have to invite people one by one every time we want to start a new group conversation.

The third is that we can communicate with LiveShare non-users. How is it possible? Every conversation with people in our contact who doesn’t have a LiveShare account – but have an email address – will be sent to their email (in a form of a link to LiveShare web app), which can be replied directly from email. It is actually really interesting, no?

Of course, even though LiveShare has these advantages, it is not necessarily makes everything easy. As the question in the beginning, LiveShare must ensure that it is reliable to deliver any message. It must also be able to attract people who are already using WhatsApp to switch to LiveShare. It’s not easy because for the time being, LiveShare is available for iOS only and not available for other smartphones’ platforms – while WhatsApp is already available in almost every platform.

Maybe I’ll use this with some friends who also use iPhone in their everyday lives. But choosing to abandon 4.2 million people and switch to a different business is certainly not an easy thing to understand. Not to mention about how LiveShare monetized this application because it’s offered for free.

But most important of all, will LiveShare be able to survive for another year with the tight competition in the realm of Messenger?