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WeChat Game
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WeChat Game

In the excellent Shanghai Datasheet there was some discussion of WeChat, which is a chat app really popular in China. They're now aggressively targeting marketing outside China, with reports of 70 million users outside of China (and 300 million users in China).

I've been playing around with this the last few weeks, and wanted to see if anyone had any tips. It has a different way of dealing with some things compared to the usual US social media apps (FB, Twitter).

People Nearby (Look Around)

This shows people close to you and exactly how far away they are. I've tried this in a few cities in the US, and it's 90% Chinese people who live or are visiting the US. Not surprising since this is an app from a Chinese company.

The response rates to randomly messaging the nearby people hasn't been that great, and one difficulty is that you're really limited in how many characters you can use to "Send Greeting" to them. Then, if they respond and you converse, it's in small greetings unless you "send to chat" and then they appear like a friend in your chat list, kind of like the contact list in Skype.

The issue here is that a) many people seem reluctant to send to chat and b) if you don't send to chat, it only shows the last two greetings you exchanged = easy to forget what you said and who they are.

Shake

With this, you shake your phone and it randomly finds someone else who is also shaking their phone. I'm not sure if it's related to when during the day I shake it, but I usually end up with people from South America or parts of SEA that are not China, like Malaysia or Indonesia. The response rate is higher because they are actively using WeChat (unlike People Nearby, it appears). Again, you are limited in how much you can write unless you do a Send to Chat. On the plus side, you can see all the people it located (for all your shakes) in the history, even if you didn't chat with them.

Throw a Bottle

With this feature, you write or say some "message" that goes in a bottle out to sea, and then some random person can pick it up and choose to respond. As far as I can tell, this feature is fairly useless. Every bottle I've picked up is just someone saying "Hello" and you are limited to only picking up a few bottles per day (or maybe I got limited because I never responded to them).

Good Features

- When you add someone to chat, it will show how you met them (People Nearby, or Shake, etc)
- The People Nearby feature can probably be leveraged well to meet people, particularly if you are in China. In the screenshot from the datasheet above, it showed there is some chat room for all the nearby users. Does this occur when you're in a city with lots of people nearby? Is it group chat? I never saw that on mine.
- Voice Messages. People can message you short voice messages, which is a good way to get an idea of the person's language skills, and also make sure they're real.

Bad Features
- As far as I can tell, all the chat data is stored on your own device, not their server. So if you chat with someone on your iPad, then load the app on your iPhone, it will not contain the past chats you had on your iPad. Effectively, this means you need to stick to using one device to keep track of the entire conversation -- very annoying. Is there some way around this? I found a way to backup and then restore chat history from device to device, but it appears to be an exact copy, not a merge of what's on both devices.. so if you backup your iPad's chat history and restore to your iPhone, it will overwrite any chat history you already had on your iPhone.
- The way you find new people and then chat is a bit unintuitive. You have to Send to Chat to have a real chat with them, which is basically like a friend request, so now all these people are stuck on your contact list even if you've had just a short chat. I prefer the Twitter model where you can tweet to anyone, and then separately choose who you follow.
- No easy way to keep "notes" on people you chat with. You can set an alias (I assume they can't see this), but that's all.

What have other people found? Any tips to offer? I think WeChat can be harnessed to meet people while in China, as well as people abroad (mostly Chinese though), but there's gotta be more of a "trick" to how to use it effectively.
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