A/S/L: Get ‘Round The Brissie Tech Startup Resurrecting The MSN Glory Days

Instant messaging sure has come a long way since the days of MSN Messenger. 


Those were the days, weren’t they? Inviting everyone on your contacts list into the same chat just to watch them freak the fuck out, only to ‘nudge’ them into oblivion. Or putting all that pointless nonsense into your display name to look really cool. Such shenanigans. 
Fkn SIK.
Since these golden days, there’s been little joy in messaging other than the occasional well-placed emoji. Where has the fun gone, I ask you? Who has stolen our fun
Well, we can’t pinpoint the exact moment or fun-sponge that soaked up your good times, but the good news is, Brisbane startup Amity want to bring it back. 
Amity is a brand new cross-platform messaging app for iOS and Android that add some pretty rad features to your otherwise boring conversations. Most notably, there’s a set of special features that are available only when two or more people are actively having a yarn, such as being able to issue a hi-five. 
Should you decide your friends hi-five is far from warranted, you can choose to leave them hanging, at which point they can hi-five themselves. Finally, a form of textual communication in which I can feel as socially awkward as I do IRL. 
We had a chat with Johnny Cheng, Co-founder and CEO of Amity, to find out what makes it so different to the swathe of other apps available right now. He says it’s way less about your run-o-the-mill messaging, and more about crafting a better way of communicating. 

“Amity is a complete messaging experience with a whole new level of life and interaction,” he said.
“We’re solving the problem of human communication, not messaging.” 
On top of the standard suite of messaging functions, you can request a picture or the location of your friends and with a simple tap, you can send that jazz on through. Another Live Mode feature even includes the ability to spew forth a live feed of emojis, allowing you to express the full gamut of your no doubt complicated emotional range. 
And while some have pointed to a lack of encryption as the apps downfall, Johnny says that kind of security isn’t far off. 
“We’re actively looking at doing it,” he said.  
“The privacy of our users is extremely important to us. We’re actually looking into how we can offer users more encryption features while allowing them to still use Amity on any platform or device at any time.”

It’s a pretty impressive feat for a team of only 8 people, particularly when you consider the competition they’re up against. It’s evident through the conversation we had with Johnny that passion is a huge driver of Amity. 

“It’s a small team of people who believe that we can change the world,” he said. 
But it’s the type of person that makes them a unique force in the war against bland messaging. 
“What brings us together is three questions,” he said.  

“Can you see what others can’t see? We believe that is about vision.”  
“Do you have the courage to make decisions? So after you can see what others can’t see, do you have the courage to actually go, ‘I’m willing to bear the consequences and the rewards of this and go after it?’”  
“The third one is tenacity, which is, are you willing to outwork everybody?

Those three things together is what’s allowed us create what we’ve created.”


We wish the Amity team all the best and look forward to more killer features. Make messaging great again!
Photo: Amity.

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