"…and then press a button that invokes Kik Messenger, which lets me send the drawing to you."

... So... Not "real-time"?

If Sketchee were real-time, you would both be drawing at the same time and each person would see the changes immediately.

This is a messaging system, not a real-time sharing system.

You could think about it as 'real-time' in the sense that you can see the status of the sharing in 'real-time' - i.e. within Kik I can see if the content has been sent/delivered/read (vs sharing via something like email where it's not clear if it's been looked at). But ya, it's not a real-time unbroken pipe between your app users.

You mean "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." ?

The real problem is what happens if Kik is not installed on either end. The hassle that the user would go through to get it working is something that probably 95% of users will not bother with, unless what they were sharing were extremely critical.

As soon as I read the title I thought of exactly what application I wanted to build with it. Upon reading the article, I promptly found out that my idea already had a name: "Sketchee". Oh well....

Well, Sketchee is probably the simplest app imaginable. You can build out on top if it. For instance, a canv.as derivative app, where you could prepopulate most popular meme images and let people create and share photobombs with their friends.

Also, basic things like location & media sharing were intentionally left out for third party app developers to get creative with.

No, you are definitely correct. I've got some other added-value ideas that would be cool. I was just a little surprised to see my first instinct was the sample code =)

you can do video notes sharing or audio/music/songs :)

I don't get it. Kik could give me direct API access to their servers. Or I could run my own Jabber/XMPP servers. What's the benefit of piping through another App on the client?

In a similar fashion, Amazon could give you the physical keys from their AWS datacentres or otherwise you could just buy some hardware, install linux on all of them and run your own cloud infrastructure.

It's exaggerated, of course, but i hope rationale behind the api is more clear this way :)

I'm saying that [Client A -> Server -> Client B] is better than [Client A -> Kik Client A -> Kik Server -> Kik Client B -> Client B].

I think the benefit is that in the first scenario, you have to maintain the server yourself. In the second, you only have to worry about the clients. It's definitely a trade off, but for some developers, the benefit of not having to maintain server infrastructure might outweigh the cost of the added complexity of going through Kik.

This will set Kik apart feature-wise from iMessage and other push-IM-on-a-phone apps.

I'd imagine this is part of their strategy for surviving iMessage. June 6 was probably not a fun day at Kik HQ.

Agreed. I looked around, and there doesn't seem to be any other chat applications with platform functionality. This is a great move.

Well, technically speaking, the BBM SDK is also open to external developers.

That said, BBM is BB only and I'm not sure how well do they do real time content sharing

This is such a cool idea. Make the instant messenger of kik more of a platform and less of an app. I love it.

Do I understand correctly that both parties need to have Kik installed on their phones as well?

Yes, you are correct. The 'pipe' needs to be connected at both ends :)

Very cool!

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but just to confirm with the OP: does the SDK allow me to add chat functionality to my app or is it mainly for content right now?

It is designed for content - textual & binary. While I can imagine an ugly fugly way to overload the api and use it for chat functionality within your app, but then it would make for a really bad user experience within your app.

This version of the SDK was designed with the sole intent of content sharing.

(I'm not the OP) It's just for content right now (content = files, arbitrary text data, images, etc). Once the content is shared, the people can chat about it within Kik of course... but that's not the same as in-app chat.

It's always beneficial if a company can ascend to platform status, but are there enough Kik users today to attract developers? It is a great concept, though.

Great next step for a great new App! Go KIK some butt!

Pretty sweet!

Looks like an easy way to get $5k to me: http://kik.com/dev/contest.php

And now go find a designer to help you out on weekendhacker :-)

Sweet, now that means Kik will get all the functionality other apps have and more (like location and contact sharing etc)

I wonder how well this will work for gaming.

The current implementation will work really well for turn based games.

Currently, it isn't a drop in network layer for synchronous multiplayer or anything, but this is only the first release :)

unfortunately anti-semitic name