離不開的聊天應用？

離不開的聊天應用？

你每天有多少時間是用在聊天應用上的？除了聊天，這些應用還能做什么讓你越來越無法離開？

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

Lucha Libre 墨西哥摔角

exotic 異國的[?g'z?t?k]

tenuous 稀薄的；貧乏的['tenj??s]

demographic 人口統(tǒng)計學的[,dem?'gr?f?k]

manual 手工的；手冊 ['m?nj?(?)l]

telegram 電報['tel?gr?m]

holy grail 圣杯；必殺技

latched on to 理解

postmodern 后現(xiàn)代的[p??st'm?dn]

saturated 飽和的['s?t??re?t?d]

閱讀即將開始，建議您計算一下閱讀整篇文章所用時間，并對照我們在文章最后給出的參考值來估算您的閱讀速度。

Talking Tech: messaging apps to boost your bubble（642 words）

By Jonathan Margolis

* * *

Any connection between Bournemouth in England and Mexican Lucha Libre — essentially rule-free wrestling in exotic masks or occasionally in drag — is likely to be tenuous.

Yet it is at a business park near Bournemouth Airport that one of the most apopular phone chat apps in Latin America, Versy, is engineered. And it is on this product of Dorset’s tech hub that thousands-strong groups of Lucha Libre fans all over the Hispanic diaspora discuss the sport and other topics of mutual interest.

Although close to 200m Latin Americans have Versy on their phones, few outside its demographic have probably heard of it or its Swiss-owner, Myriad.

Messaging is an insanely big business that nobody predicted.

At an Orange press conference in London 20 years ago, someone asked if we tech journalists had heard of SMS. We hadn’t. They explained that it was a function hidden in Nokia phone manuals whereby users could type short messages to one another.

I wondered what the point would be of reverting to, in effect, telegrams, now we had the futuristic holy grail — portable Batphones to talk to any other Batphone in the world?

But Orange had noticed millions of these sparse messages being carried on its network. They believed British children had discovered it as a way of talking in class without talking.

It was years before America latched on to SMS. If a Brit said, “I’ll text you” in the US at that time, it evinced a blank look.

Now, however, we are where we are. In the era of WhatsApp, no young person makes phone calls. Even classic SMS has been eclipsed, and with post-SMS messaging, a new linguistic culture has grown up.

Texting has also moved into a postmodern, post-text mode. With Snapchat and Instagram pictures replace language. Then there are emoji. Childlike? Perhaps. Yet I know people in their 20s of PhD-level intelligence who communicate almost entirely by emoji.

In China, meanwhile, young adults predominantly use WeChat to send short recorded messages, thus looping the loop back to voice, but in a newly inconvenient form, more like push-to-talk radio.

You might imagine that in a world where messaging apps used by millions but can remain largely unknown, the market is saturated.

But there are signs that messaging is still growing. At Facebook’s annual developer conference next month, code is expected to be released that will allow functions like ordering a taxi to be done from its messenger feature without the effort of opening a taxi app — you will just text an intelligent robot to get you a cab.

Then there are new and potentially big messaging apps emerging. Without looking hard I have stumbled on three in just a couple of weeks.

From a room behind a Subway store in San Francisco’s SoMa district, a start-up headed by Silicon Valley veteran David Temkin, an engineer on Apple’s original mobile product, Newton, last week launched Cola.

Cola allows users to create communication “bubbles” for groups to collaborate in specific real time tasks. At one time you might have a bubble running for friends organising a night out, another for colleagues setting up a business meeting and so on. It may sound superfluous, but see it in action, and it works.

Six thousand miles away, in a co-working space above Wimbledon Library in south London, a team is working on Kapa (Maori for “team”), an app for organisations such as sports clubs to huddle, discuss team selections, tactics — and collect subscriptions. Seems a sound idea.

Too many messaging apps for one world? Maybe. But, as Cola’s Temkin says: “Messaging is not a winner-takes-all thing.

“People don’t feel the need to displace one app with another. They are getting comfortable and familiar with the idiom and with having several messaging apps for quite different purposes.”

The evidence suggests he is on the money with that.

請根據(jù)你所讀到的文章內(nèi)容，完成以下自測題目：

1. What is the Versy as mentioned?

a. a phone chat app

b. a business park

c. a popular airport

d. a Lucha Libre fan

2. Who had noticed the sparse messages being carried on its network?

a. SMS

b. WhatsApp

c. Orange

d. Versy

3. Who communicate almost entirely by emoji as mentioned?

a. adults higher diploma

b. children

c. teenagers

d. undergraduates

4. What is the status of messaging market in author ' s opinion?

a. saturated

b. potential

c. stale

d. unpredictable

[1] 答案a. a phone chat app

解釋：Versy是目前很流行的一款手機聊天應用。

[2] 答案c. Orange

解釋：最先注意到這一商機的是Orange 股份有限公司。SMS指短訊服務（Short Messaging Service）

[3] 答案a. adults higher diploma

解釋：根據(jù)原文“in their 20s of PhD-level intelligence”的表述可推斷出正確答案。

[4] 答案b. potential

解釋：作者認為這一市場還正在成長，并用Facebook的叫車功能等佐證，不僅僅是聊天應用。