I am truly impressed to see the amount of people here subscribed to Blackberry products. I think that the main attraction of this is the Blackberry Messenger that uses a Personal Identification Number or PIN. While I like the idea of instant messaging, I find its connection to a specific device quite enslaving. I wonder why most people, after having instant messaging with MSN messenger, Yahoo, or Google Talk which are independent of the device, just open a new Blackberry account that they cannot retrieve from another non Blackberry phone. For me, it seems that belonging to the BB network for the sake of belonging stems probably from a desire of a sense of importance, and an attempt to fit in.
I am not against Blackberry per se though. I do not have one, but if I had, I would keep using the instant messaging I have used before. Besides, I am not sure if I want to be available 24 hours to everybody, unless it's nuclear family or so... just weird to me.
Far from surprising, the new Live Profile PIN has been launched to do the same with non-Blackberry phones. Now Androids and iPhones have more chatting options available for them, and most of the Blackberry users I know also use this new PIN. All this seems counterproductive for me. I think that belonging to a plethora of social networks and using multiple instant messaging options may create a false idea of being connected and engaged, when in reality the attention is being dispersed and the communication channels, in the best case, are duplicated.
