BBM's New Snapchat-Like Features Rolling Out Now

Once Blackberry made BBM available to other platforms, the rush to check out an old favorite was on. We all ran to download the "new" app, find a friend, and revisit old times. Sadly, BBM was pretty much as we all remembered it; a straight-up chat platform. Today, Blackberry is introducing a few features to BBM designed to make their service stand out. Timed messages, message retraction, and HD picture transfer dominate the list, but will it finally get you to use BBM again?

With Timed Messages, you will get to choose how long your contact has access to pictures and messages in the stream of your conversation. this is a bit reminiscent of Snapchat, except it has more granular control than Snapchat's disappearing messages.

Message Retraction is complimentary to timing how long a message stays live, except it's an after-the-fact service. With retraction, you can pull a message out of the stream just after sending it. The video below explains why that might be handy.

An HD picture transfer option is also nice, and the new "sticker picker" lets you choose which stickers you might want to use in chat. Like their new music discovery engine, which tells you what music your contacts are listening to in BBM feeds, we're not sure stickers will be all that important to most users.

Still, the newest-look BBM is nice, and it has some pretty neat features we could imagine ourselves using. That's if we could find someone on there we'd like to chat with, and with so many competing services out there, it's hard to find a reason to migrate to BBM, cool features or not.

Existing users, though — they'll love taking advantage, here. Blackberry doesn't offer a timetable for when BBM will update for you, only saying "It may take 24 hours or more for the update to appear in your app store depending on your mobile platform and region."

Source: Blackberry