Got these details in this morning from Sarah Rice, PR for huge South African instant messaging service MXit. Fascinating.
I’ve reproduced the whole announcement in full as I know it’ll be of interest to quite a few.
The latest version of MXit, version 5.0, is available for download from noon on Monday 25 September 2006 with the company expecting over 50 000 downloads of the software in the first day.
The free mobile instant messaging platform has taken the South African market by storm since its commercial launch a year ago. There are currently 1.8 million registered MXit users with the numbers increasing by an average of 8,000 a day.
Herman Heunis, managing director of MXit says, ‘The response to the beta version we tested in early August was phenomenal. We put the wap site link out to a few selected users and within a day the news of the beta version had gone viral and there were over 3000 downloads. If this is the response from a closed group test then we can expect a fantastic response to a public announcement to the whole Mxit community.”
The current version of the software, version 3, has been in use since May 2006. ‘I know what you are thinking,” says Heunis. ‘What about version 4? Well, there was a pirate version 4 doing the rounds a few months ago, so rather than confuse our community, we moved onto version 5.”
There are a number of new features and functions to the instant messaging solution. The most significant is the ability to send and store files from text messages to pictures and ringtones. The files are limited to a size of 150kb, which is slightly more than the size of a ringtone and the equivalent of the size of most mobile games.
‘This functionality is phone dependent but as the penetration of more advanced phones increases we will see more people using this functionality,” says Heunis
Heunis stresses that files can only be shared between contacts. This means that users will only be able to send and receive files from people they have actively accepted as contacts and with whom they are willing to communicate. Users will not be able to post files in open forum chat rooms due to security reasons.
Other new functionality includes:
· The ability to store up to 50 files on the MXit servers. Users can retrieve and forward files to individual contacts or a contact group of up to 10 members
· The ability to personalise the MXit interface with a choice of skins
· An emoticon menu for the easy use of the full range of emoticons when chatting
· An online status menu to enable users to change their status to online, away or do not disturb
· The ability to SMS to a MXit contact. The user will be charged normal SMS rates by the cell phone network provider.
