Can cute emoticons bring Line to the top?

A few days ago I found out another messaging app, yes I'm not kidding and it's called Line. It may be just another messaging app available, but the fact that they have attracted more than 20 million download especially in South Korea and Japan does raise an interesting question.

Is there a market for niche messaging app such as Line? Apparently there is.

Line, developed by Naver Japan, subsidiary of Naver, of the most popular internet company in South Korea, have attracted massive followings because of their cute emoticons. At least that what all my friends said to me when I asked what differentiate Line from Whatsapp. Don't get me wrong though, Line also has direct call feature, something Whatsapp doesn't have. But the fact that the emoticon (or stickers) are the most popular differentiation factor for user is yet another interesting point.

Based on all these fact, I couldn't help to conclude that there's still a market for instant messaging app such as Line.

If Line can exploit the dire need of cute emoticons, there's a lot of other things that can attract users from IMs like Skype. Of course I'm comparing Line with Skype because of the feature similarities. But Line successfully extract user's needs and create a product providing such needs, and it may be cultural than anything, who knows.

Currently, Line is available on Android and iOS platform but they're expanding to desktop apps as well and not a lot of their competition does that. In a way, it puts them in line with Yahoo! Messenger, only more awesome. This confirms the fact that there's still a big market for instant messenger and there's definitely a lot of room for niches and innovations in this space.