If you follow our tech startup sister site TechCrunch, or if you've read any of the reports from the South by SouthWest (SXSW) conference this year, you've probably seen a lot of column inches given to current-media-darling "group messaging" apps. SXSW has a reasonable track record of predicting the Next Big Thing. It was where Twitter first came to many people's attention in 2007, for example, and it was an early success story for Foursquare in 2009, too.
My usual reaction to hype like this is to roll my eyes and avoid the apps in question altogether, although that might just be because I've never blagged tickets to SXS
