BlackBerry worshippers and elitists everywhere may soon start to find their faith is paper-thin. While most have cited supreme security, bottomless business purposes and the addicting capabilities of its exclusive BlackBerry Messenger Service in their assertion of BlackBerry superiority, this trifecta is about to lose the appeal of its heaviest hitter — BlackBerry Messenger.

Yes, I know it’s blasphemous to the institution of CrackBerry, but BBM is soon to come to iPhone and Android platforms at an undisclosed time. Goodbye exclusivity, goodbye any viable reason high school and college students would want a BlackBerry. Hello to a whole new smartphone landscape.

If, for some reason unbeknownst to the universe, you are unaware of what BBM is, here’s a rundown. BBM is an application common to all BlackBerries, regardless of service provider, phone model or country of origin. It is a feature that is world renowned for its speed of message delivery and enabling of users to more effectively stalk their contacts.

Allow me to elaborate. When a message is sent via BBM, the status of the message is tracked through a visible indicator next to the message. There are symbols for when a message is delivered and read, as well as when sending fails.

The ‘R’ symbol, which stands for ‘read,’ has even been modified into an insulting verb. A phrase such as ‘I’ve been R-ed’ means something along the lines of ‘I know ____ read my BBM but isn’t responding.’ I can only speculate as to how many tiffs have erupted from the ‘R’ phenomenon, but I’m going to go ahead and guesstimate that it’s a lot.

This nifty BlackBerry feature has undoubtedly played a key role in allowing the BlackBerry smartphone market share to hover at about 30 percent. With the dissipation of the exclusivity of BBM, the popularity of BlackBerry phones may wane as well.

This begs a question of Research In Motion, the parent company of BlackBerry and effectively BBM: Why? Well, with RIM dipping in the stock market more than expected over the past fiscal quarter, it’s possible the company is looking to its strengths to clench to profitability.

And with the iPhone having recently been made available to Verizon customers, which ushered in a whole new wave of BlackBerry-to-iPhone converts, the demand for the multiplatform BBM is there. With the release of BBM, users will no longer face the dilemma of choosing between a beloved messaging system and a user-friendly smartphone.

It appears the faith of a BlackBerry user is being shaken and is oftentimes crumbling. Business users may clutch to BlackBerries for its encryption capabilities, which make it a secure mode of communication, and more seasoned generations may continue to use it for the sheer fact that it has a keyboard in lieu of a touch screen. But many users who are college-aged and below are jumping ship.

BBM for the Android and iPhone is speculated to be available in about a year, but in the meantime there are plenty of third-party messaging applications that serve the same purpose.

Two current favorites of mine are called LiveProfile and WhatsApp, both of which provide messaging services to Android, BlackBerry and iPhone users alike. They both offer a message-delivery-notification system similar to BBM’s and are seemingly just as fast. Oh, and did I mention they’re both free?

But if neither fit your fancy, there is a veritable goldmine of free messaging apps for you to choose from. So while you wait for RIM to release BBM for the Android and iPhone (or dread it if you’re a BlackBerry enthusiast), shop around your App Store and get accustomed to messaging your friends who use other platforms. Allow me to borrow from The Beatles for a moment to summarize the gist of this messaging miracle: ‘Imagine all the people, messaging in harmony.’

Jessica Smith is a junior information management and technology and television, radio and film dual major. She can be reached at jlsmit22@syr.edu, but she’ll probably be too busy waiting for her LiveProfile friends to stop R-ing her messages.

Published on March 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm