Livetext app is silly fun, but no Snapchat

Chances are your phone is chock-full of messaging apps already, whether it's Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Yik Yak or something else. Even so, Yahoo is hoping you’ll give its latest app, Livetext for iOS and Android, a shot.

Think of Livetext as text-messaging that marries some of Snapchat’s ephemerality with some elements of Periscope and Meerkat live video. But Livetext's live video sports text without sound: You can see the other person, but communication mostly happens by text. Once the session ends, the entire conversation disappears.


Confused? So was I. But Livetext makes more sense once you try it. Here are our first impressions.









Livetext officially launched in the U.S. on Thursday, and while it’s very early days –- day three, to be exact -– finding people to chat with might be hard to do.

One or two friends may have already downloaded Livetext, but more likely you’ll have to add friends from your address book. Pick a contact, and Livetext shoots them a brief text from your phone with a link to download the app.

Even after doing that, I only managed to have six contacts on Livetext, including two colleagues and two Yahoo employees. Maybe that will change in the coming weeks if Livetext gets some traction with people. Then again, maybe it won’t.







IMAGE: MASHABLE, ADARIO STRANGE
Good silly fun (sometimes)

Once you pick someone to start a conversation with, you shift over to a screen where the upper half is a live stream of your friend and the bottom half is a typing field and your phone’s virtual keyboard. What you and your friend type is displayed in large colorful letters atop the video — each line eventually fades and “falls” off-screen.


Taking sound out of the equation seems like a strange moveTaking sound out of the equation seems like a strange move–- an arbitrary handicap imposed by Yahoo that forces you to text. Sure, it’s a little awkward at first, but in several chats, that actually made for some good, silly fun.



Eventually, the fundamental idea behind Livetext begins to make some sense. A lot of nuance can get lost in plain old text-based messaging. Maybe your friend meant their texts to be supportive, but instead they came across as brisk, almost critical, because the skipped the emoji or you didn’t have more context, like their facial expressions. Livetext offers that.

Because the app just came out, there are bugs. In one chat with a coworker, video was really choppy on both ends for several minutes, even though we used Livetext on Wi-Fi with our iPhone 6s. On her end, she noticed a few lines of computer code pop up in the video feed.






A Yahoo sign stands outside the company's offices in Santa Clara, Calif., Monday, May 20, 2012.


IMAGE: PAUL SAKUMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
What's next

Yahoo has a fun, compelling product in Livetext, but the app must overcome some serious challenges.

The messaging space is already extremely crowded: WhatsApp has over 800 million users, Messenger has 700 million-plus, and Snapchat has over 200 million by some third-party estimates, just to start.
Launching Livetext so late in the game won't do the app any favorsLaunching Livetext so late in the game won't do the app any favors — it makes attracting users that much harder.



Livetext must also overcome Yahoo's own branding. The 21-year-old company remains a force in tech, but it's not "cool," and hasn't been since the early 2000s.

The company instead might want to take a lesson from Facebook. From a pure marketing perspective, Facebook may be the second-most trafficked web site in the world with 1.49 billion users, but as a publicly-traded company and a service also used by mothers and grandmothers now, it's not exactly "hip" anymore. Yahoo and Facebook have that in common, at least.

Which is why Facebook is basically distancing its brand from many of the standalone apps it owns and develop. The social network doesn't want Instagram, Messenger and others to see its growth, particularly with younger users, possibly hobbled by the public's perception of of an "aging" Facebook.

If Yahoo wants to attract the same younger millennials that gravitate to Snapchat with Livetext (which it so obviously does), it's not doing itself any favors by making Yahoo's logo so prominent in areas like Livetext's app icon.