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Who's On WhatsApp, and Why?
theodp writes "In announcing its $16B acquisition of WhatsApp, Facebook confessed it had very little data on WhatsApp's estimated 450 million users. Asked about the user data, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said, 'WhatsApp has good penetration across all demographics but you are not asked your age when you sign up.' Wall Street analysts concerned by Ebersman's answer won't be comforted by GeekWire reporter Taylor Soper's (non-scientific) poll of UW students, which suggested that WhatsApp may not exactly be BMOC (Big Messenger on Campus). 'I don't use it at all,' replied one UW junior. 'I've heard of it but I have so many other things I do online that it would just be another time-consuming thing. I use Facebook or texting to talk to people.' WhatsApp did fare better in a survey of Soper's Facebook network, where responders said they used WhatsApp mostly for communicating internationally and in groups. So, are you or someone you know using WhatsApp, and what's the motivation for doing so?"
she's 16 and uses whatsapp all the time because it's cheaper than SMS. I guess they get their demographics by analysing word frequency histograms, age being inversely proportioal to LPS ("like" per sentence)
The only thing I know about WhatsApp is that for a while I was getting a lot of mail that was either spam from it or from scammers pretending to be it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I only heard of it because of its acquisition last week, and haven't used it.
I'm a 20 year-old in a South American country. Here WhatsApp is the chatting program of choice and I'm on the following groups:
-One group for the guys on my university classroom
-One group for the close friends
-One group for friends living on different states (Dota 2 players)
-Another group for other friends
Usually young men also have groups for exchanging NSFW pics of female friends and ex-girlfriends.
Topic!
I'm a 5-digit /. user, i.e. an old guy, but I do use WhatsApp. Only with international friends, though. Even then I tend to use Facebook messenger, but there were a few people who wanted nothing to do with Facebook, and they were actually the ones who pushed me to WhatsApp. I wonder what will happen with them now.
Almost everyone I know that has a smartphone (~80% of the people I know) uses WhatsApp for messaging one-to-one and for groups.
I'm a South African and most of my friends and family use WhatsApp. In South Africa, as in many other developing countries, SMS text messages are expensive and WhatsApp is used to save costs. BlackBerries are also (still) popular here - free BBM was a main reason for its popularity. WhatsApp's cross-platform capability (iOS, Android, BB and even Symbian) makes is a very attractive option.
Please see the article below:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/...
Facebook just paid 16 Billion for software, or data whichever way you want to look at it for something I've never heard of and I am pretty sure I am supposed to be part of the target demographic for both companies. Something just doesn't seem right and it's not just that Facebook had the 16 Billion to begin with.
I use email.
I use it, it's pretty popular in the Netherlands. However I am looking for an alternative.. But not Telegram (which seems to be picking up a lot of refuguees).
I would love something open source, so I'm going to have a look at Wazapp (a.ka. OpenWhatsapp). Anybody have any experience with it?
I know my opinion isn't the authority on what's hot and what's not, but I had honestly never heard of WhatsApp until the acquisition made the front page of Slashdot. Most of my coworkers opine same.
What do all of these messaging services offer anyway that I don't already have with the built-in messaging app on my phone? I can already send videos, pictures, and text, and include multiple people and such, all with the built-in app. I've never felt the need to look for anything else.
Its great for comms - images, chat, multi-user. My Indonesian friends got me onto it when I was living there. Its non-cloudness is something I love. It goes only to one phone and that's it. Images can be saved to your phone, so you have a record of docs and pics, if you want.
I think its appeal is an international, simple, well-made messaging tool. It does everything you want and nothing more. No anti-features ads, etc.
Bugs include sporadic push notifications, but that is pretty minor.
I'm 29, male, British.
I use it primarily for it's group messaging function. For example, 1 group is comprised of all members of my sports club and we use it for general communication and organising teams etc for the weekend.
Obviously then use the photo and video messaging (not for that you dirty bugger) as it's free within my data plan.
That's how my friends use it. Especially they're in/from Asian countries.
Just because it's not popular in the US, it doesn't mean it's not popular elsewhere. I hate these US-centric polls. Seriously, interviewing college campus as a sample size? And then proclaiming a big fat "no" whether it's used?
WhatsApp has recently overcome a similar dilemma, albeit with a differing strategy.
Zuck has exhibited an ability to transition from product creator to successful CEO, so it's entirely plausible he knows what he's doing here. Of course, by default, it's also plausible he doesn't.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I can tell you why I don't use WhatsApp.
While a competent mobile-oriented IM is a good idea in general, I intensely dislike the fact that they went with binding your account to your phone number. I juggle several SIM cards, and that's a no-no in WhatsApp's book.
I infrequently use Kik for the same purpose as WhatsApp, especially linking its detailed message delivery status, but their recent changes to TOS and embedding a browser in-app makes me wary to continue.
I don't use it for anyone else and no one else I know uses it. It is a handy app, but with Facebook acquiring it now I'm seeking alternatives. I used to use fb messenger but uninstalled it because I'm sick of being tracked and sold.
...lots of people aged 12-50 are using it as their main texting and groupchat app. I have friends, family and colleagues in there and everybody I know on it uses it extensively. Also, anytime there is some event (be it sports, nights out, bachelor parties, holidays) or any type of real-life group is established (roommates, classmates, families, close friends, fraternities), WhatsApp is there to facilitate. By the way, any comparison to traditional texting is ludicrous: with recorded voice, "I am here" GPS location with maps integration, multimedia sharing, etc. Just like most of its competitors, I'm sure.
I have seen the app in the Google Play store, but since I have unlimited messaging from Verizon, felt no need to use it. The app appears to be more popular overseas than in the States due to the high charges that foreign wireless providers charge for SMS. This app allows users to avoid those charges. It looks like this is a play by FB to tap into the large international user base of this app, imo...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Just providing my own anecdote to the conversation. Seems like the entire* country of Dominican Republic is using WhatsApp. From what I recall, BlackBerry Messenger had become the IM app of choice. People saw it as "free SMS". Everyone wanted a BlackBerry, just for the messenger app. Long after RIM had lost most of it's marketshare here in the US, it was still going strong there. Eventually though, they couldn't ignore the iPhone anymore, and WhatsApp was one of the few IM apps that worked across the phones. Now, black berry is dead, and iPhones have iMessage, but WhatApp has momentum, and much better group messaging features. I personally don't know of anyone in the US that uses WhatsApp without there having been a need to communicate which someone internationally that has it. Stop looking for users in the US. That's not where the WhatApps users are.
Kids and "poor" (i.e. not western middle class) people (with a lot of overlap between the groups). Nobody in my acquaintance (30-40ish WASPs) uses it..
Most plans in Denmark have free SMS, so that's the messaging application of choice.
-- Make America hate again!
Someone invited me to use it a few months ago. A quick google search turned up some horror stories about security problems and privacy issues (some people reported that it downloads and spams your phone's entire contact list), so I took a pass on downloading it.
Probably right up Facebook's alley, though.. :)
Fuck Facebook.
Fuck Whatsup.
So will WhatsApp bring more than 16 billion in net profit throughout its lifetime?
Because that would be needed to break even on the price they paid, that, or to find someone else to pay 16B or more. At 450 million people, that would require each one of their users to pay $35 dollars for 16B dollars revenue, not profit. If their users are 7 billion instead (the entire world population), that would require $2-3 dollars from each one.
I have WhatsApp installed on my smartphone, and the only reason I use it is to NOT PAY for sending SMS messages. That's what their user-base is - people who don't want to pay. How they plan on getting more than $35 from each and every one, is beyond me.
I was using the groups aspect of it until it started hassling me every few hours to upgrade it... but the permissions had changed to wanting access to pretty much everything on the phone.
Uninstalled. Not missed.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
since they don't know what they spent money for... they are asking here ????
Everyone with Smartphone use WhatsApp. It is easy,multiplatform, and you can send image, text and audio. Now Facebook has the telephone number of all people in the world and the connection between people. It's not so bad for them.
I have a couple of cousins, one in Mumbai and another in Singapore. The Mumbai guy was very impressed and persuaded me to install WhatsApp. I could not see why I would use WhatsApp over email when I have a data plan on a smartphone. Some of my brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law from India send me WhatsApp messages. They find it easy and convenient to send phots through this App. Otherwise it is as useless as it gets. I would probably pay 1$ or two for it. Not sure how many of my correspondents from India would.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A few college students in America say they don't use it.
But so what if _all_ college students in America don't use it? College students in America are Facebook users already; they aren't why Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp.
There's a big wide world out there, theodp.
and I don't give a darn.
Who's on first base, Why on third.
What's on second, I dunno is on third.
It's used because it uses your data connection for messages, bypassing the carrier's SMS charges. That's all there is to it.
Am I the only person who can't understand why anyone in their right mind would pay 1 billion, (let alone 19 billion) for a company that pretty much just does IM for phones? I mean, there are a ton of instant messengers out there. Most have good phone integration. Whether this will break even for Facebook or not is a given. It wont. They may not loose their shirt, but there is no way they are going to make their 19 billion back from a company with 40 million in revenue. The math doesn't add up. Even if paying ~$40 a user was a good move for a company like FB, there is no reason people will stay on WhatsApp if they don't want to. It's not like FB where leaving can be tricky if you have a lot of content there you don't want to loose access to. You aren't going to see a mass exodus of FB, but within a matter of months, you could in WhatsApp. Having said that, the creators of WhatsApp get massive props. Creating a platform that does something that 50 other competitors have and are already doing, and then selling it for 19 billion dollars is massively impressive. With these numbers, I'm going to have to reevaluate Blackberry's stock price. Valued currently at under 5 billion, BBM has to be worth at least 10 billion by itself. Which means the stock should double in the next few days, as Google looks to acquire BBM to compete with Facebook.
it's more than that?
Who's On WhatsApp, and Why?
We are on WA because there is no open communication protocol in widespread use!
It's like everybody is sitting on a different island, where slowly people are migrating to the island with the largest population.
WA should be forced to use XMPP, the protocol that they modified such that they could lock their users in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You diid text all 450M users and confirmed they all texted back, right? Right?
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Used WhatsApp as an alternative to SMS, but security issues and acquisition by Facebook drove me off. And I didn't want to pay a subscribtion for something as trivial as an unencrypted chat.
After looking at alternatives, I made a decision to switch to Telegram, looks and feels almost exactly the same, has an open source, free and open API, desktop client, end-to-end encryption and is free. For now it is financed by Digital Fortress fund (although I would donate should the need arise).
I use it because it's cheap (uses data which I already have on my phone and not text message which I get charged per message). Also because the people I communicate with are all on different platforms (iPhone/Android/Blackberry) and It had group messaging.
I use a few different messaging apps, more then I'd like to use to but not everyone all uses the same one so I have to be diverse. WhatsApp is the only messaging app I have, outside of text messages (MMS), that allows me to send a video directly to someone. I don't need this feature often but when I do, WhatsApp has it.
if I had to pick a favorite it would either be Hangouts or Facebook Messenger due to the fluid nature that I can roam from my phone to PC to tablet, etc, during an active conversation and still be involved with the conversation without being bound to one device or being explicitly bound to just that app.
Both Hangouts and Facebook Messenger can be used via the Pidgin application on my Linux desktop, as well as other applications and OS's, though I have recently switched to the Hangouts extension for Chrome which auto starts when my window manager launches with a systray icron.
People started using it because it is cross platform, when lots of people had Symbian phones, and it pulled in all your contacts from your address book, so you didn't need to manually add all your friends like some other services. Now there's no real reason to change.
A friend did a quite decent analysis on Telegram's shortcomings regarding what they offer:
http://blog.tincho.org/posts/T...
He points at this second article, that strongly criticizes Telegram's supposedly strong, proprietary crypto:
http://unhandledexpression.com...
Nothing like texting "hey beautiful! Good morning!" to your "loved ones" group at 7PM!
Most people I know in the UK use it a cheaper replacement for MMS. Sending pictures quickly and much more cheaply with inclusive data bundles. A lot of people have unlimited SMS but MMS is still very expensive for some reason.
In Spain it is used virtually by everyone -- meaning if you do not use it, you are an outlier in the plot. Basically because in Western Europe many phone companies still make you pay for SMSs et. al.
However, it is not just "texting" -- it offers audio, video, maps, etc. and it is quite fast (performance-wise). Even their image browser is *far better* than the Samsung/Android default, to be honest. It also notifies you when your message is recorded in the middle server and when it arrived on the destination *and* works reliably to some degree (e.g. compared to Hangouts).
There are some privacy concerns and some problems (at least in the past) with its encryption -- but then again, you should not use it for sensitive stuff.
So I agree with other posts -- for Western Europe it is widely used and they just got 80%+ of the mobile phone numbers there and their connections between them. Also because of the "named groups" feature, they can mine a lot of data on more connections and even assign "interests" that people are/were not faking. e.g. if you see "The XYZ club" and have 10 people in it, and that XYZ is something about clothes or a brand, you know that those people like clothing or that brand or whatever.
There are lots of SMS replacement/chat apps available. In the past I've tried Kik, Viber and a few others. Mostly they suck. The fact is that Whatsapp feels better engineered than the others, especially on Android which often feels like a neglected platform. On my Galaxy phone, it is more responsive than the built in SMS functionality.
Add in the lack of advertisements, and you've got a winner.
Lots of people have packages with tonnes of text messages making them, essentially, free or very low cost - however SMS doesn't do anything beyond 1:1 communication in plain old text. So picture sharing and group chats are out.
MMS can do that, but it's often excluded from SMS packages - so after a few messages it can start to get rather expensive. Even more so when you are sending these things to different countries.
iMessage can do that too and it's nicely integrated into iOS. If your friends aren't using iOS though then it all falls down.
So, combining these all together gets you the following wish list:
WhatsApp (and the like) fill this gap.
In the future, I expect to see an update to WhatsApp on Android that allows it to take over as the main SMS application. That way it can work in the same way as iMessage on iOS - if you send a message and the recipient is on WhatsApp then it goes via them. If not, then it gets sent as a plain old text message.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I’m a European expat working in Malaysia. I never heard of WhatsApp before getting into the country one year ago. Now I’m using it every single day. It seems the whole country gave up on SMS and using nothing but WhatsApp for everything from photo sharing to group messaging.
It's a mobile messenger app similar to the old PC version of ICQ or the BB messenger. People around the world started using alternate messaging apps like this to get around hefty fees some carriers charge for SMS. If your country/region has free or low cost SMS, these alternate messaging plans are not as popular. WhatsApp happened to be one that became more popular than others. I guess Facebook calculated that if they can get all of these people around the world using it under the Facebook umbrella, it will give them more eyes, more users, and more user information.
FB could sign up 19B users for $19B if they pay $1 per user when they use facebook messenger. I know what the entire population of the world. Who cares? The investors are all after the number of users. I don't think they care much about number of REAL people, do they?
I installed WhatsApp (iOS) as it was one of the first cross platform messengers that allowed me to send messages on the cheap while traveling to international congresses with my coworkers, some of which used BBM and early Andriod-based phones. This was about 5 years ago, and have used it since with, primarily with Indian nationals as well as Pharmaceutical Industry professionals.
I lived in Singapore for four years and moved to Hong Kong a year ago. WhatsApp is used by nearly 100% of the people in these two cities.
You don't have to learn Morse Code to write an email. Literacy in any written language suffices.
I'm 5 digit /. user, and I use WhatsApp since the very beginning, it replaces BlackBerry messenger. FYI my country is one of the top BBM user and currently a massive number of my friends are already migrated to WhatsApp.
And another thing, we don't use SMS since very long time ago except for spam adv.
My family got WhatsApp while traveling in Europe, with no data plan on our US phones. Since most hotels have free WiFi, it was the low cost way for my wife and I to communicate with our kids when we split up for a week to different countries.
Back home, it is still being used, as it is handier to group people than SMS/MMS... I was thinking of paying for it when my free year was up this summer, but now that FB bought it, I will drop it. I am not a FB user.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The dude wrote a good "customer simulator" system, that is what the 16bills are for.
This acquisition makes less sense the more hear about it. Facebook paid $16 billion (or is it $19 billion?) for a messaging app, and they don't even know who's using it? How on earth did they put a value on this thing? It boggles the mind.
Until Facebook bought it. I've since switched to BBM. It's a Damn shame too... It was a great app.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
*cue rimshot*
In fact it was the only reason I decided to buy an smartphone, because I was more than adequately served by my old "dumbphone". But we cannot stop progress, I guess...
There are a few wonderful features of it:
* Ridiculously simple to use: don't even need to log in
* Works with Android and iPhone
* You can send pictures, videos and voice, seamlessly
* It's reliable
* GROUPS!
* No silly 140 character limit
* Ultra simple to use (yes, again, but it's so easy even my father can use it).
That is a well known fact, such a poll is rather useless.
I don't know how accurate graphs like this are: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/...
However WhatsApp has a hughe user base in Europe and Asia.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Don't look for logic in these sorts of aquisitions anymore - its another tech bubble getting ready to burst.
Nothing is bursting. Capital suction has little or no effect in the digital world these days. No one cares if you burn a million or a billion. It's about data and market share, revenue be damned. Do you think running whatsapp indefinitely cost any more than a crew or two of developers and some rackspace in some datacenter nowadays? Twitter is run by 13 people. 13 people!
They don't care about revenue, they want your data and they want lock-in. And they'll trade lock-in for data and omnipresence at any time.
It's about 4,5 billion people on this planet about to be connected to the internet in the next few years, with devices that cost less than what a fourtnights worth of Starbucks costs us.
We are moving head on into a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of digital connectivity - from there on out it's all about attention and mindshare. The purchase might bomb, yes, but it might as well just turn out to be a real bargain. And if it bombs it won't even do a blip on FBs bank account. And others won't care either. Those who have VC can buy into WhatsApp like startups for peanuts because deving, deploying and scaling has become so dirt cheap. So even if they all bomb we'll be back to business as usuall 4 weeks into that.
The world is changing, and it's changing fast. The dot-bomb era was just people getting ahead of them selves in a way that wasn't good for them. The hardware wasn't there, Databases and IDEs costed more than luxury cars, and what passes as a toy today was a cray workstation in 2001 that would set you back 30 grand. It was silly back then. It isn't now.
Reality is catching up. Fast.
Bottom line:
I wouldn't hold my breath for any bubble of sorts bursting any time soon.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Up until Facebook got them, anyway, I had been a WhatsApp user since the early days. Almost everyone I talk to uses it as their primary chat channel and as far as I can tel, it's the defcato chat tool in Europe. Different countries seem to latch onto different apps though, people in other countries often use Viber for instance. Another plus over SMS (give that with 5,000 free texts a month, price wasn't an issue) is that I'm in a semi-rural location and often have no phone signal so being able to chat via WiFi is useful.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I confirm this for Switzerland. Almost everybody I know uses Whatsapp, it's very very popular around here.
He creates/offers/buys a free service that by its nature can learn a lot about its users. He then gradually relaxes privacy assurances and changes the sharing defaults to "we can do whatever we want with information we collect about you", and sells the info to advertisers.
Anybody who thinks this won't happen to WhatsApp hasn't been paying attention.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Which provider/plan is that?
I live in Italy, I'm almost 30 and I've not sent or received a sms in months, everyone I'm in contact with uses whatsapp. This includes my friends, my family, colleagues etc. Even the older members of my family in their 60s use whatsapp. It works (mostly) it's easy, it has group chats (almost 50% of my daily usage is on group chats with friends/family) pictures, videos sharing. Plus here it's much more common to have an adequate amount of data than unlimited sms. Add that many friends live around Europe/world and whatsapp has no match, if not similar alternatives. Maybe it's just because Italian are chatty people but here whatsapp is definitely a thing.
In countries like Rwanda, Pakistan and India it rules the roost. I'm sure many others too. The Internet is bigger than than U.S millenials. Their strategy of being on so many platforms (iOS,Android, Blackberry, Nokia Symbian, J2ME for dumb phones) really helped with the "network effect".
And don't underestimate the international angle. It's a globalized world, many people have contacts across borders, and they want to use their phones to talk.
For those talking about free SMS being a replacement, the killer user story here is the persistent group chats, with seamless picture sharing.
Frictionless signup (it just uses your phone number and automagically fills in your contacts) certainly helped too.
The behind the scenes story is that they extended XMPP to make it mobile friendly with proprietary customizations. I'd like to see a similar effort with the open standard itself. Then I'd like to see a mobile XMPP client open source project that makes quality execution on all platforms a priority. The Internet is being balkanized and the fight for standards based mobile messaging is the new battlefield.
I collect foreign nationals on Faceboook, so I can be informed of other perspectives.
I first heard of WhatsApp from all the Muslims in my newsfeed.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
I use Viber since it is more common in my country. Here the SMS service is not so expensive, but the MMS is something like 0.25EUR per message. So using Viber for pictures and etc is saving money. I don`t use it for phone calls however since the voice is rubbish compared to the regular phone calls. My monthly subsription includes 600MB of traffic and reduced speed afterwards for 8 EUR + 500 free minutes.
I somehow started getting emails from WhatsApp, and they appeared to be spam so I deleted them.
1. for ($x=0; $x 450000000; $x++) { $username=get_random_string(10); create_user($username); } 2. Profit!?!?!?!
While I admit up front that there is a lot I don't know. I'd never even heard of WhatsApp prior to this purchase announcement. That said, I have an extremely hard time believing that this company is worth anywhere close to $19 billion. The company employs 55 people and if they do have 400 million users, that means they have revenues of around $400 million / year since they charge $1/year for their service. Even if their net profit margins are really high (say 30%), that means that it will take Facebook 158 years to recoup their investment. ($19B / ($400M * 0.3) = 158 years) While I'm sure there are probably ways to increase revenues, its not clear how this is a sensible use of funds by Facebook.
I'm not saying WhatsApp isn't valuable but I don't see how Facebook doesn't end up writing off a few billion in a few years.
And yet Facebook apparently disagrees. I'd suggest that they probably did a lot more math than you did before shelling out.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. You would be amazed how little thought sometimes goes into big acquisitions, particularly when the company is essentially owned by one guy who can do whatever he wants. I'm an accountant and I've been involved in a few acquisitions in the past. Some companies really do the math and others just throw out a number without checking really deeply. Zuckerberg doesn't strike me as a due-diligence kind of guy. I think they (he) wanted to keep it out of Google's hands and were willing to pay whatever it took to make that happen.
Let's take the 400 million users number at face value. This means roughly that WhatsApp has roughly $400 million in revenue / year. Let's assume they have a very nice net profit margin of 30% which is similar to Apple or Microsoft, ie very high. That means that to recoup their $19 billion purchase at current profit levels it will take 158 YEARS . Explain to me a scenario where that is a sane purchase price.
I'm not saying the company isn't valuable, but I am pretty good with finance and I cannot see how Facebook didn't grossly overpay.
In Italy everyone use whatsapp, no other messaging apps are considered, fron teenagers to adults!
WhatsApp already has 450 million users, if Facebook were to roll out their own app, they would have 0 users, and would be trying to take away from an incumbent.
True but that doesn't make $19 billion a sane price to purchase the company. Even under the most optimistic scenario I can come up with it will take Facebook somewhere over 25 YEARS to make their investment back. At current likely revenue and profit levels the time to break-even is around 150 YEARS.
WhatsApp didn't have to take them away from anyone, they had first-mover advantage.
So did Altavista and MySpace and lots of other companies. Being first mover isn't always and advantage. Sometimes it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
I come from India and almost everyone uses whatsapp.
This is relevant later: you have to understand the messaging rates in India, many charge around 50 paisa a sms, some have schemes like pay INR 100 and get daily 100 sms for a month or first three SMS at higher rate, rest 97 are free.
Reasons Why it is Successfull:
1. atleast 4-5 years ago, many people owned nokia and devices that did not have android/ios, they were wya out of budget and whatsapp was there that worked on S40 Symbian phones.
2. Many people do not have internet at home and if you are gonna shell out INR50+ for SMS, might as well get a data and use it also to Facebook and twitter and email.
3. Also BBM was way more popular but that device was expensive even then, no only that carriers required a special plan to support bbm and now and people found an alternative in whatsapp
Whatsapp success is in its ability to support cross platform IM other than iOS and Android, which matters a lot in second and third world countries where people do not tend to buy expensive phones.
Twitter is run by 13 people. 13 people!
And Twitter has yet to turn a penny of profit so I'm not sure what your point is. If they can't turn a profit with overhead that low I would be rather concerned if I were an investor.
They don't care about revenue, they want your data and they want lock-in. And they'll trade lock-in for data and omnipresence at any time.
Yeah we heard all the same BS arguments back around 1998-2001. They were bullshit then and they are bullshit now.
We are moving head on into a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of digital connectivity...
"Post scarcity"? You've been watching too much Star Trek.
The purchase might bomb, yes, but it might as well just turn out to be a real bargain. And if it bombs it won't even do a blip on FBs bank account.
If you think a potential $19 billion write-down is just a "blip", you really don't understand finance. This is an investment that even under the rosiest scenario I can come up with, will take decades to break even. WhatsApp may be valuable but there is no way in hell it is worth that much money right now.
The world is changing, and it's changing fast. The dot-bomb era was just people getting ahead of them selves in a way that wasn't good for them. The hardware wasn't there, Databases and IDEs costed more than luxury cars, and what passes as a toy today was a cray workstation in 2001 that would set you back 30 grand. It was silly back then. It isn't now.
I love watching people who think the laws of economics have suddenly been repealed. It's hysterical. We heard all the same stupid arguments 15 years ago. Every other fool was trumpeting the "new economy" as justification for their stupid business plans and bad investments. A stupid valuation is a stupid valuation. There MUST be some way to recoup the investment or it is a waste of money no matter how many eyeballs it delivers or how much the company thinks they have "locked in" their users. If you can give me even a vaguely plausible way that this purchase makes financial sense at $19B, I'll eat my shoe in barbecue sauce.
And every single person I know who has a smartphone, or any other kind of phone capable of running Whatsapp, uses it.
No, you don't do the same thing. I use WA to do chat, group chat and media sharing with people on Android, IOS, Windows Phone, symbian and S60.
You don't.
One here for ONE the TWO people that I know that can't be bothered to own a damn iPhone.
The other, my Dad, who falls for the Jedi mind trick that Verizon pulls every time he goes into the store. 3rd Android phone and he still doesn't know how to use it.
I just got back from traveling through Bedouin country in Jordan, and several Bedouin men who live miles from civilization without wired electricity and whose extent of knowledge of technology is how to drive their truck and charge their feature phone from solar panels separately told me that they use WhatsApp to communicate with other Bedouin families and friends. The cost savings over SMS is key, but the brilliance of WhatsApp was the decision even in this day and age to implement Symbian and J2ME clients.
gee...
I sent International messages to friends and family.
It's cheaper than SMS, allows conferencing and really easy sharing of pictures, interface is better that regular Android SMS. Biggest drawback is that you can't use it from your computer. I also use Google Talk (now reluctantly hangouts) and regular sms. Never use MMS.
I have been using whatsapp for about 5 yours already. living in the Netherlands where unlimitet texts (sms) subscriptions hardly existed around 5 yours ago. When a sms sets you back 9 €cents its way easier to have a few Mbs of data witch gives you limitless texting+photos+music+video. in the Netherlands 99% of people with a smart or featurephone use whatsapp,
Some people only with wifi but most 3G or 4G internet. I think the Us is one off the countries where whatsapp is not so penetrated 99 percent of my texting the past 5 yeas was trough whatsapp. Most people with these phones also use it for facebook but facebook messenger never really made it to the masses.
I dont know if it will stay like that now facebook acquired whatsapp a lot of people consider switching to telegram or other messengers.
For now around 50 % of my contacts started using telegram since the news about facebook buying whatsapp. Just in a few days and just on the idea that sooner or later facebook wil merge the whatsapp database to their facebook information machine.
I know telegram is probably just as bad (since it is owned by vkontactAKA russian facebook)
I dont think facebook or whatsap will be the last big social company/platform, I think people are getting increasingly aware that free means no privacy with these big companies. And maybe, just maybe one of these days an opensource platform without (mandatory) central servers/datamining will emerge witch will let the people communicate in an honest and secure way
I have to pay extra for unlimited SMS (and this is recent, a few years ago SMS was absurdly expensive).
SMS at almost any price is absurdly expensive. SMS is about the closest thing in the known universe to pure profit. The primary cost of it is administering the billing system.
Nobody, because it's shit.
You can all go home now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's called Hangouts.
email is pretty much instant these days.
Wouldn't be if you sent it to me. I do not check my email constantly even though I have the ability to do so. My phone does not alert me when I receive an email (on purpose) since I get so many of them. However it does alert me when I receive a text message because I don't get those from a wide group of people and the ones who send one to me usually need my attention in some way. I can receive text messages in places I cannot get email or where email is prohibitively slow. Furthermore, not everyone I send text messages to is interested in constantly checking their email for short messages that require no reply.
everyone has an email addr (not everyone has IM or wants to)
The use cases are different. They overlap but only if you don't consider the needs of the party you are communicating with. Just because someone has an email address doesn't mean that's how they want to communicate nor is it necessarily optimal for a given circumstance. I send text messages (or IM) when I want to communicate something immediately but don't necessarily require more than a brief reply if any. Basically any time I might use a phone but don't want the handshake over head ("hi, how are you?...") and don't need strictly synchronous communication. Email tends to get read and responded to much slower by most people. That's fine in a lot of cases but there are plenty of times where you want to have a closer to real time conversation but don't need to say a lot. I tend to use it in circumstances like when my wife is at work and I want to let her know I'm headed home.
It's called Vender lock-in. Look at Skype: Microsoft bought Skype then gradually downgraded its quality so they could increase control and monetization of the service. Now, there are plenty of competing services but they're not compatible with Skype. For one person to leave Skype, their entire social group must switch too. Very few people can effect that level of change.
I think WhatsApp is an open standard: So it's easy for someone to buy some servers and pipes, then build a competing service. That means spending money to build a better experience and getting WhatsApp users to 'jump ship', dealing with copy-cat competitors, dealing with WhatsApp creating vendor lock-in through closed standards. After spending all that money, the developers will want to earn a profit. It doesn't matter who gets mind-share, "all roads lead to" a tech start-up buy-out.
What facebook really bought was access to the eyeballs of WhatsApp users.
I just switched to it recently due to the ability to embed images in messages - something that I can't do in SMS. Up to 16MB videos work as well
The app, won't delete. The service, won't uninstall. The error, that my version of WhatsApp is updated and I have to upgrade, appears even before my phone considers connecting to the internet. No thank you, I would like to uninstall please. No? Sigh. Screw it, I'll just use the iPhone.
Spent All My Mod Points
1 person in 15 uses the program, and out of the hundreds of people I know, nobody uses it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Think about it. Do they really generate so much money from those stupid little adverts that nobody clicks on? When was the last time ou clicked on a FB ad on purpose (sometimes it happens by mistake) and actually bought something?
Perhaps the government has a dark money fund which it pays to FB (and Google) in return for the largest surveillance network ever. 16Bn for an app with 450M unverified users? I... DON'T... THINK.... SO. Just sounds a bit fishy to me.
Just a thought.
I've been using WhatsApp since about a year. I live in the Asian part of our globe, which is credited for hosting the majority of WhatsApp users.
As for why I use it, I'm unsure. Everyone I use it to contact with has got data plans. We're all on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Hangouts, all of which offer some form of "direct messages". A majority of us are also on Viber, BBM, and other such platforms. I only started using WhatsApp because my comrades used it, although it offers no attractive features.
http://shikhin.in, "A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?" -Albert Einstein
...and if you travel and have friends across national borders of smaller countries, price gouging by operators for international SMS text messaging is the main driver.
I live in European and WhatsApp is very popular over here.
It's NOT a social network "platform" or anything like Facebook.
In it's simplist form, it's simply an SMS replacement - free (more or less) and great for group "chats".
Why do I use it? All my friends were always complaining that I didn't have it and to include me in any events that they were organising, they had to send me SMS's separately - eventually I gave in and installed it and so far I don't regret it.
Lots of my contacts use WhatsApp here in Morocco because SMS texting is ludicrously expensive. MMS simply out of the question. My crappy telephone operator (Méditel) has deigned to upgrade the amount of free SMS messages on a five hour telephone plan from 20 to the staggering 100. Using WhatsApp is convenient, rarely consumes much of my data plan (given that more often than not I'm connected via WiFi). It's popular across all ages, socioeconomic classes, especially in a country where mobile telephones are far more popular than landlines. I am a heavy email user, but I rarely use email for quick and dirty messages especially when I want a quick response. Whilst many users here have Viber, WhatsApp and the like installed on their telephones, many (especially the under 25s) rarely have an email application installed. Personally I'm quite happy to give out my mobile number to casual contacts whom I would never in a million years accept as a Facebook friend. On a final note, I much prefer Viber. Interestingly though, whilst most of the contacts I have on WhatsApp also have Viber accounts, 99% of the time they send a message via WhatsApp.