Blackberry BBM's social efforts started from 6.0

RIM, which has always been showing people with a steady business image, recently released BlackBerry Messenger 6.0 and made some social attempts, which is also consistent with previous rumors.

BBM 6.0 brings important improvements:

Added a social platform that allows third-party applications to read user information, send friend invitations, and share content.

Add geographic location sharing and introduce various LBS services.

The most typical example is Foursquare, which is the most popular Check In service. Now you can send the Check In status to friends of BBM. Poynt is also a popular LBS service. With the new features of BBM 6.0, users can search for restaurants, hotels, and gas stations nearby, and then send location information directly to friends.

The APIs of the BlackBerry social platform were open to developers a few months ago. RIM's idea was to build its own social services based on the huge user base of BBM. Obviously, this is under pressure to pursue troops such as WhatsApp. BBM is unwilling to be held down by the "Another IM" hats and is unwilling to be marginalized. Do you think RIM's strategy will succeed?