What’s old is new again. How we connect has changed a lot in the past two years — from pre-pandemic to mid-pandemic, irl to fully remote to now hybrid, and now with web3. Still, the most important way to connect today predates every ‘social network’ and effectively predates the web itself — it’s the group chat.
1️⃣ Group chat can complement a social network, or it can be the network itself.
Tl;dr — Groups chats are the deeper communication layer that complement social platforms focused on discovery and organization.
Some group chats arise directly from real world interactions and become the social network itself. The best examples of these are group chats with family, friends from school, or colleagues at work. You’re often comfortable sharing your phone number with these people, and group chats help maintain these relationships. Sometimes a large group chat can serve a whole community.
Other group chats arise indirectly, from interactions that start or happen on different social networks. A conversation that begins with public tweets and replies might move to a private group chat, either on-platform (e.g. DMs) or off-platform (e.g. Whatsapp).
Group chats — as a standalone product or feature — are a critical part of the social network ecosystem, where platforms generally differentiate on one of the following:
Discovery is about being exposed to new people, content, and ideas in high concentration. Broadcast-style platforms like Twitter, Twitch, TikTok are strong in discovery, with a density of public content and focus on audience-building.
Communication is more of a utility for maintaining relationships, usually downstream of discovery and connection IRL or in another medium. Apps like iMessage, Whatsapp, and even Snapchat lean on communication as the core.
Organization tools help structure and facilitate communication, public and private, among a defined group, team, or community. Platforms such as Slack and Discord help groups communicate via channels, threads, and permissions.
While companies tend to dominate one of these domains, when they reach a given scale, they usually go beyond their core to build complementary features in-house.
We’ve seen discovery platforms add more direct communication features, usually starting with an inbox or 1:1 DM feature and eventually group DMs (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok). Discovery and communication apps are now experimenting with building native organization features to help create and manage growing native communities.