Does anybody know if they're planning on making this available via their third party API?
I've checked the current API docs [1] as well as the Google Group [2] and the StackOverflow Posts [3]. There's nothing mentioning it yet.
This would be an awesome feature to have available in third party apps, so that one could have it in other chat clients apart from the official iPhone app. Adium is one example, but there're probably even better solutions. After all, one of the most annoying things about WhatsApp is that I have to use my phone to answer messages or read messages. It just feels stupid to tap away on a small screen to send a digital message while I have a 27" screen and a full keyboard right in front of me. That is something where iMessage and Facebook messages are way better.
Also, there were, for quite some time, third party Instagram messaging solutions [4], and I'm really happy that they're finally implementing this straight into Instagram. Beforehand, you'd see people having discussions that were bordering on being private by continuously posting comments to an image. This happened all the time. Now these discussions can move into private space.
I'm pretty sure they won't make it available. They still don't allow uploading images to their service using an API, so I doubt they will allow to send messages.
After the Twitter example, APIs are not attractive to these kind of startups. If you give full capabilities to 3rd party developers, they're going to create clients for other systems and the startup will lose control over its content and how it's shown to users (ads).
I've checked the current API docs [1] as well as the Google Group [2] and the StackOverflow Posts [3]. There's nothing mentioning it yet.
This would be an awesome feature to have available in third party apps, so that one could have it in other chat clients apart from the official iPhone app. Adium is one example, but there're probably even better solutions. After all, one of the most annoying things about WhatsApp is that I have to use my phone to answer messages or read messages. It just feels stupid to tap away on a small screen to send a digital message while I have a 27" screen and a full keyboard right in front of me. That is something where iMessage and Facebook messages are way better.
Also, there were, for quite some time, third party Instagram messaging solutions [4], and I'm really happy that they're finally implementing this straight into Instagram. Beforehand, you'd see people having discussions that were bordering on being private by continuously posting comments to an image. This happened all the time. Now these discussions can move into private space.
[1] http://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/instagram-api-develo...
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/instagram/
[4] http://instamessage.net/