MessageMe might have been forced off of Facebook’s social graph, but the new messaging app still has something to celebrate. Since launching on March 7, MessageMe has picked up one million users, with the help of its previous Facebook integration, and $1.9 million in funding to boot.
MessageMe is growing quickly with usage soaring past 500 “notifications” per second around the world. Admittedly one million users is just a small fraction of the 100 million users that apps like LINE, Nimbuzz, and Tango have raked in, while WeChat’s user base exceeds 300 million users. But in just 12 days, it certainly isn’t a bad start.
Of course part of this huge user base is thanks to MessageMe’s former Facebook integration. Continuing on this upward drive will be more difficult now that that’s been pulled.
Arjun Sethi, MessageMe co-founder revealed to BetaBeat the root of Facebook’s problem with MessageMe. The assumption has been that Facebook wasn’t open to sharing its users with other products that looked too similar to its own service. After all, MessageMe hits too close to home for Facebook Messenger. With this in mind, Facebook pointed MessageMe to its policy guidelines where the fine print prevents developers from copying Facebook’s products, or even from creating a direct competitor. And clearly there’s competition there, given the amount of users that signed up for MessageMe in only 12 days. Imagine how many users MessageMe would have signed up in the next few months. If this rate keeps up MessageMe could have 10 million users in four months.
You won’t see the ability to access your Facebook friend’s list in the app anymore as the MessageMe team feverishly worked over the weekend to get rid of the feature. It’s a minor roadblock in Facebook’s reluctance to hand over its social graph to the small but growing club of “banned” developers, including Vine, Yandex, Voxer, and now MessageMe. But MessageMe might have tipped just enough with its million users to jump start its growth flying solo – at the very least, the app got a strong start.
