WeChat is a Chinese mobile voice and text messaging communication service which was developed by Tencent. The software first hit the markets in the month of January on 2011. The software is available for a variety of platforms. The software also supports a lot of different languages such as English, traditional and simplified Chinese, Spanish, Indonesian, Turkish, Portuguese, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Korean, Thai, Italian, Hindi, Vietnamese, and Russian. This software requires Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G or 4G networks for running, and communicating. WeChat allows messaging texts, voice messaging, video or photo sharing, broadcast messaging, location sharing, along with contact information sharing. This software also supports social networking, which is be achieved through shared streaming content feeds and location based social plug-ins to connect and chat with local and international WeChat users. One can also take photos and place them in journals so that other WeChat users can view them. The various user data is very much protected by the on-demand contact list backup and can be got back to or from the cloud. This software puts more stress on the privacy of the users and quick response performance.
Technical aspects of WeChat
We chat can be run on almost all the platforms of smartphones. Although at first the software was designed for Android, and iOS platforms. Then gradually as the market started to expand, the developers released versions for other platforms as well. Now WeChat can be installed and run on OS X, Nokia Symbian, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. This software is available in Google Play Store for Android devices, in App Store for iOS, BlackBerry App World for BlackBerry, Mac App Store for OS X, and Marketplace for Windows Phone. After installing the software, the registration is concluded using Facebook connect, mobile phone SMS/VM, emails, Tencent QQ. Once the software is successfully installed, the user can add friends in a variety of ways. Some of them include searching by ID, contacts in the mobile phone, QQ account, and scanning the QR codes. After adding friends, the user can join a group or create a group of his own. Then he can chat with all the friends in that group in a chat room.