As a chrome app dev (Videostream is our app) the transition has been really annoying. They've given us ample time to prepare for the shutdown and we've developed a new app, from scratch, to work outside of the Chrome app world but they (as engineers tend to do) did nothing to mitigate the disaster of a transition. Through blogs, tweets, etc. directly pointing to the webstore, we have years of SEO built up all pointing directly to what will now be a dead link.
We've been pestering Google for a way to have a redirect or link on that page that says "get the app for windows and mac in its new home over here" but they haven't been very responsive. It's such a shitty way to treat developers who chose your ecosystem and who you did a certain amount of convincing. They have done this to us once before, with their wallet for digital goods, where they shut that down and developers lost any recurring subscriptions they had on the platform.
Basically, google is brutal if you develop on a platform for them that they decide to axe, they really don't think of the people and companies and how they will be affected and we now think twice before choosing to use anything they maintain.
I think the point is that they ARE sending eachother money, just in less efficient ways. Looking at how people use snapchat it isn't as much about ephemeral as it is about speed. It's much easier to send a picture to someone in snapchat as the flow is better, and it doesn't leave a stupid photo on your phone (and on several cloud backups) that you didn;t want to stick around forever (e.g. check out this awesome car, you don't need a copy of that)
I thought this move was awesome. In my 17-25 year old life my friends and I were constantly owing eachother money for random things. If someone could pay me back right there for no charge that would have been my dream. We debated building an app for it at one point, just to tally who owes who what. It was a big enough issue I carried an excel doc but not enough to go out and search a standalone app for it. If the function is easily integrated into an app I use for something similar, however, I feel like I may pick it up.
Also teenagers aren't using gmail or square, etc. now so if snapchat can take them over before university they have a better chance of winning, imo. I do believe this is a market to be won going forward, at least in that 17-25 demographic (also why bitcoin got me excited, no fees for small transactions is a REQUIREMENT for person to person payments).
Are you looking for a SAAS solution to spin out quick? You'd need to roll it out to see if it did keep people around and then need to keep watching your numbers as the community grew. Eventually as you get a large user base you get issues with how many people are in one "chat", moderation of offensive content, how the experience itself scales, etc. which is why larger sites may not do it (or they never found value in it)
If you're doing the startup thing though, just roll it out and see if it helps you get to a better place and keep evaluating if it's core and worth it to maintain. GoInstant has turned into Platform as a service which could maybe handle the real time component.
We've been pestering Google for a way to have a redirect or link on that page that says "get the app for windows and mac in its new home over here" but they haven't been very responsive. It's such a shitty way to treat developers who chose your ecosystem and who you did a certain amount of convincing. They have done this to us once before, with their wallet for digital goods, where they shut that down and developers lost any recurring subscriptions they had on the platform.
Basically, google is brutal if you develop on a platform for them that they decide to axe, they really don't think of the people and companies and how they will be affected and we now think twice before choosing to use anything they maintain.