The Disruptive Power of iMessage

You could argue that Apple has changed the way we do things several times. The way we buy music, use our phones, operate our computers and so on. But the world has pretty much overlooked one of Apple’s greatest ideas yet: messages.

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It started with iMessages, an iPhone/iPad app that lets you send text messages between Apple hand-held gadgets without cost. Instead of using the cellphone network (and paying 20 cents each or whatever), texts you send using this little app get sent across the Internet, costing you pretty much nothing.

These Apple messages have many advantages over regular text messages. For example, the tiny word “received” appears beneath any message you send to let you know that your recipient’s gadget has received it. (If the recipient has turned on “Show read receipts” in Settings, you’ll even see the word “read” to let you know that the person has actually read the message.)

If you’re in a back-and-forth conversation, the text messages show up on a single screen, scrolling up in conversation balloons like a chat session. While the other guy is typing, you see “…” in his balloon, so you know he’s working on a response and not just ignoring you.

You can send pictures and videos through Messages. And you aren’t held to the usual 160-character limit of phone text messages.

And if you have more than one iGadget — say, an iPhone and an iPad — you’ll find the same message threads on each one. You can pick up on a chat from wherever you left off on a different machine.

Above all, Messages means that you can keep your text messages. They’re not locked onto your phone, like regular text messages. And they don’t scroll away forever, like regular text messages. You can go back and refer to them whenever, and they’re backed up every time you back up your device.

So: Messages is cool. And coolly clever, the way it cuts the cellphone company out of the revenue stream. But that’s not the big news.

Apple announced recently that this summer, it will release a new version of Mac OS X called Mountain Lion. And Mountain Lion will come with a new Mac app called Messages. You can download the beta version of Messages free, right now, even before Mountain Lion is available. (It’s actually just a beefed-up version of the previous iChat program, and still includes all of its audiochat and videochat features.)

O.K., this is where things get crazy. Suddenly your computer and your phone are sharing the same communications stream.

First, this means that you can now send text messages from your computer, using a full keyboard, which is a fairly radical change right there.

You’ve been able to do that computer-to-phone trick before, but it’s been tricky. For years, I’ve been using Google Voice to send text messages for that very reason: on its Web page, I can send text messages, free, to phones, with the full comfort of mouse and keyboard. And you could sent text messages from chat programs — but only with special codes, and, of course, without the ability to resume the conversation on a different device.

But Messages is the first time there’s been a low-friction, mass-available way to send computer-to-phone messages.

The second huge change is that now you have your entire hard drive full of attachments — photos, videos, documents — to send to people’s phones. From your computer.

Third, Messages preserves all of these exchanges, just as the iPhone did. But it’s far more useful to have your transcripts on the actual computer. Now you can archive them, search them, copy and paste them, print them, forward them and so on.

Finally, Messages blurs the line between text messages, chats and e-mail. Or maybe it erases the line completely, and creates something entirely new.

(One wild side effect: It gives birth to this frequently asked question: “Are you on the phone or the Mac?” For the first time, there’s no way to know. You can’t tell if someone’s being terse because she’s tapping out her responses with one finger on glass, or because she’s on her computer but just distracted.)

Messages is in beta testing, so there are some kinks to work out. They’re actually kind of cool: side effects of the disruptive Messages change.

For example, when I’m conducting a chat on my Mac, the iPhone in my pocket goes nuts, vibrating or dinging madly with each line. Remember, the phone believes that each line of the chat is an incoming text message. Sure, I could go into Settings and turn off the ringing and vibrating — but that’s a lot of trouble every time I start or stop chatting on the Mac.

Similarly, a number of times, I’ve had this bizarre situation: I’ve conducted a chat during an airplane ride on the laptop. Then, when I land and turn my phone back on, it’s tied up for seven minutes, furiously downloading all of those “text messages” that happened while it was asleep, frantically vibrating or dinging.

I mean, this is logical. It’s what Messages is supposed to do: sync the phone, tablet, Touch, and Mac. But there should be a setting somewhere: “Don’t alert me when downloading messages I’ve already read.”

There are also some bugs, including some creepy sequencing errors. I’ve seen text messages appear chronologically in the wrong place in the Mac transcript, for example. Even among Mac-to-Mac chats, I’ve sometimes seen messages appear too soon in the transcript.

Finally, I don’t know if I’m typical, but I had some trouble getting started. You have to have an iCloud account (it’s free) to make the syncing work between devices, and somehow I had to enter the proper e-mail address in the phone’s Settings before everything worked.

I hope Apple gets around to solving these glitches. In the meantime, Messages will be changing the lives of heavy texters everywhere. Phones, tablets, Touches and computers are now all equal citizens in the world of short typed communications. Photos, videos and documents can now be part of computer-to-phone correspondence. Your dialogue can be archived and preserved forever.

In other words, for heavy communicators, the one small modification Apple has made to the rules has changed the game completely.