"hi everyone this is sonal welcome to the a6 & Z podcast we have two guests joining the pod today long time a 6mz partner Connie Chan who focuses on China and wired senior writer David Pierce who was f..."

"course of writing the piece that about one huge unanswered question that I still kind of have is why does this work so much better in China than anywhere else well I think there's a number of things i..."

"design cruft like we invented all these ways in the u.s. to do different things and we kind of siloed everything off in its own place because that was the right way to do it you have used a much more ..."

"so easy to forget to do and so rare that you even see it with snapchat which built this gigantic user base out of letting people talk to people I have like pretty rapidly changed that will just not sa..."

"short period of time yeah I read something the other day and I'm gonna totally make up this statistic but some a rage ously high like 95% of text messages get read within three minutes or something li..."

"think one area of app design that's very common in China but not as seen in the States is the usage of QR codes and the usage of the scanning feature in any app and WeChat is actually it's heavily rel..."

"for example we chat because QR codes are so commonly used you see posters all over the places in malls where stores have have their QR code and it says WeChat and says scan us to to follow us on WeCha..."

"really great messaging app and then everything kind of builds out of that right and I love what you touched upon which is how how you can use it to contact strangers I think a lot of people don't real..."

"you can meet strangers anyone born after 1979 is an only child and so loneliness is a very real problem in China no I mean I think the thing that really struck me about WeChat and kind of this phenome..."

"then it grew from there and it seems it seems so obvious in retrospect that it would be that way but I think so many things try to do it in that in the wrong direction or they try to do something diff..."

"so one of which hats first major official accounts was a celebrity singer and when he first launched his account he put out videos and he put out audio recordings and he would sing messages or say not..."

"interesting in addition to that I think we chat helped enable that by giving these celebrities these official accounts such strong capability and targeting so for example a celebrity can send a differ..."

"one thing as a United States user I just that I might not understand or somebody who's been using a computer for a long time but why what is it that's so powerful about being in WeChat the whole time ..."

"pieces of this whole thing is that these payments really like once you bake money into it they opens up everything else like I think the easiest example for me to the easiest metaphors is iTunes reall..."

"integrating payments well so I think it's it's it's clear that most companies seem to understand the power of being the one thing you use to pay for everything which has led to there being a thousand ..."

"it seems like but it's nothing here everybody is trying and nobody is doing it here which is wonderful and also sort of frustrating because you can do with anything any way you want which leads to eve..."

"completely different so they had a separate team create a new type of communication messaging platform so what was the do you have a sense of kind of what the initial sort of push was for them because..."

"why payments is so critical to WeChat users how payments work in this app basically what you do is you go to one tab where you can see your WeChat wallet and here you can link your banking cards or yo..."

"always the thing you have where as I feel like and this is sort of oversimplifying but that there's something to the idea that I think people in the US when they're gonna pay for something they take o..."

"and all this stuff and I think the idea that messaging and and chat is an interface for doing really powerful things with technology and not just typing in a text box but all kinds of sort of conversa..."

"before like another example is the stickers the stickers on WeChat some of them are licensed and some of them are cute and animated but a bunch of them that are frequently used at least among me and m..."

"and then when you can bake that into getting more work done to do things like book flights and get you know get movie tickets and instead of having to go back and forth and back and forth you can just..."

"technology that seems like that's it that's kind of this neat moment that we're at now is where these things are starting to come along that work the way that we do and we don't have to remember how t..."

"gets tricky though on the conversation element is WeChat is increasingly being used in the workplace and that's probably really hard for people in the States to see but a lot of Chinese companies will..."

"off shut off from work well I just imagine like if I'm if I'm drinking I can I should not be trusted to not have one my boss's name by accident instead of my friend's name that sounds that's just that..."

"perpetually walking on both sides trying to figure it out and people don't seem to worry about it as much like I have friends who you know drunk text they're bossed and it's not it's not weird no I I'..."

"messaging apps and social networks where social networks kind of necessarily become performant right like you're you're playing some sort of character whether it's business character on LinkedIn or yo..."

"there metrics I just was I have no idea like are there do you get you know points on WeChat for doing anything like are there winners and losers of WeChat not in terms of like how many friends you hav..."

"this to me is the thing that's so different about WeChat from anything in the US I mean it seems like you know to keep coming back to Facebook but they they have Facebook loves to break out all of its..."

"doing 12 things better than we chad is very very hard the reason why we tried is so convenient is it because it really is a place where a bunch of apps are within an app right and so what people don't..."

"part of what I talked about in my piece was that that's there's part of that that's scary that there's once you have enough people using your app for enough things and often enough you have all of the..."

"actually be if and when something takes over because there's this whole side of it that's wonderful and this is like this is the debate we have with Google all the time where it's like how much how mu..."