Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls (techcrunch.com)

Speaking of instant messaging and VoIP call apps, Facebook announced on Wednesday that Facebook Messenger has hit the 1 billion monthly active users milestone. The company adds that Messenger is just more than a text messenger -- in addition to the ambitious bot gamble, a digital assistant, and the ability to send money to friends -- Messenger now accounts for 10 percent of all VoIP calls made globally. Messenger's tremendous growth also underscores Facebook's mammoth capture of the world. The social network is used by more than 1.6 billion people actively every month. WhatsApp, the chat client it owns, is also used by more than one billion people.

TechCrunch has a brilliant story on the growth of Messenger from the scratch.

Comments

WhatsApp

[LichtSpektren]

I'm not exactly sure why Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In any case, if I understand correctly, WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default, whereas for Facebook Messenger you have to manually opt for a "private" conversation to get EtEE. It would be best if they deprecated the latter in favor of the former.

Re:WhatsApp

[110010001000]

Why continue to develop what you already have with developers you already employ? Why not spend billions of dollars acquiring software and engineers you don't need? You have to think like an executive. If they aren't "buying" stuff they aren't important. There is a reason that Facebook has 13,000 employees now. It has nothing to do with the business.

Re:WhatsApp

[invictusvoyd]

WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default

What is the use of end to end encryption if a malicious app can read your keystrokes.

____________________
What good is a phone call Mr. Anderson , if you are unable to speak.

Re: WhatsApp

[ShieldW0lf]

Because servants are their own reward.

The goal of business isn't to generate wealth, it's to control your fellow man.

It's good to be King.

Re:WhatsApp

[JaredOfEuropa]

WhatsApp covers a somewhat different market segment. One of its strong points is that accounts are (in most cases) tied to phone numbers. This makes it an attractive option for mobile phone users: the app instantly knows who on your contact list is also using Whatsapp. When the service was launched, this made the switch from SMS rather painless, since there was no need to add existing contacts manually into a new list. Whatsapp probably has a fair slice of those users who do not, for whatever reason, have a FB account. They could drop Whatsapp in favor of Messenger, but they risk losing those customers. Instead, why not keep both and datamine the crap out of both market segments?

Re:WhatsApp

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Why continue to develop what you already have with developers you already employ? Why not spend billions of dollars acquiring software and engineers you don't need? You have to think like an executive. If they aren't "buying" stuff they aren't important. There is a reason that Facebook has 13,000 employees now. It has nothing to do with the business.

I doubt they cared very much about the software or the developers in the valuation. In that respect I think we agree; they didn't really need those things. What they needed and what they bought was 1 billion active users.

Re:WhatsApp

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm not exactly sure why Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger

Why they want to own both markets or why their code bases didn't immediately converge? Both seem like rhetorical questions.

It seems very likely that, over time, both will share a core messaging base. If they have different skins on them at that point, it will be for market segmentation purposes.

The Signal protocol is currently limited to three devices. That doesn't suit the Messenger model well. Messenger's e2e is limited to one device right now. That's obviously a problem still, but might keep some people from jumping to Wire.

The double ratchet is a good idea, but until these things get federated, the market is going to remain a mess. Corporate silos aren't good for the Internet's security.

Re:WhatsApp

[thegarbz]

You have to think like an executive.

Something you're not capable of. You brush this off as a failed acquisition rather than a successful market capture. For anyone not using Messenger Facebook has WhatsApp. Developers or competing products have nothing to do with it as long as money is funnelled into the same final account.

Re:WhatsApp

[110010001000]

I didn't say it was "failed" (even though it is). They spent $19 BILLION on a company that has no profit, and maybe around $800 million in revenue. Just for "market capture". Except many WhatsApp users also used Facebook Messenger, so you are "capturing" people you have already "caught". For a fraction of that they could have built WhatsApps features into their platform and competed. But for an executive with too much cash, it is more fun to acquire and bloat the company some more.

Re:WhatsApp

[110010001000]

But many/most of those active users already used Facebook as well. So they paid $18 billion to get a small increment of users? These acquisitions are driven by ego, not business sense.

Re:WhatsApp

[ilsaloving]

Because Facebook's userbase is limited primarily to only a few countries. WhatsApp basically has the rest.

By having both, Facebook basically has an almost world wide monopoly on messenger services.

https://www.similarweb.com/blo...

Standards

[silas_moeckel]

Or complete and utter lack of them. Wake me when they start support xmpp/sip for txt and voice.

Re:Standards

[thegarbz]

The wonderful thing about taking the noble stance on this issue is ... the silence of no one being able to communicate with you.

Open standards would be nice, but until that happens WhatsApp / Messenger / Skype are on my phone to stay.

Re:Standards

[silas_moeckel]

Actually do just fine without whatsapp and skype I just refuse messenger calls and use a third party app on the pc/phone.

Re:Standards

[thegarbz]

Yeah I find it easier to not make it difficult for people to contact me.

Re:Standards

[chrish]

On the third hand, it's really freakin' annoying that I don't use any of the apps you've listed, and yet I've got three messenger apps open at all times (BBM, Hangouts, Slack), with Signal on there as well (although texts are rare for me).

At least I can run Hangouts and Slack on my laptop too, but man, I miss the days of being able to communicate with "everyone" using one app, even if it needed several connections.

Laptop's got Adium running for IRC and XMPP as well. At least those are the open standards, but it's still at least three messenger apps going.

Get off my lawn, etc. but I remember how irritating this was the first time around with MSN, GTalk, AIM, and all the others.

Check everyone's pipes for lead

[Anonymous Coward]

Because apparently people are getting stupider and stupider. Headline should read:

Facebook Messenger Spies On 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All Surveilled VoIP Calls

Facebook is your friend.

[Qbertino]

Facebook is your friend.
Facebook watches over you.
Everybody loves Facebook.
Trust Facebook.

Re:Facebook is your friend.

[ilsaloving]

You forgot:

Work will set you free.

Re:Dumb F*cks

[known_coward_69]

i know some old people who use it to call internationally for free to catch up or take care of some family matters like cleaning up grave sites. should they be afraid of the NSA as well?

Re:Dumb F*cks

[jareth-0205]

It has 1 use.
Lets you filter your idiot friends, if they ask you to use it, you know they aren't worth knowing!

And reading the techcrunch arse licking, tells me they are not worth reading.

The number 1 problem is it takes over your phone, the nosy facefuckers are grabbing everything....

Must be exhausting being so superior all the time. I'm sure your friends appreciate your constant judgement of them.

Re:Good to hear it's brilliant!

[cayenne8]

All I know....

I'm not on it, or part of it, and proudly never have messed with FB.

I heard something from Dennis Miller the other night that caught my ear:

"Never have lives less lived been more chronicled."

from the scratch!

[Sir_Eptishous]

TechCrunch has a brilliant story on the growth of Messenger from the scratch.

Re:Dumb F*cks

[thegarbz]

Yeah what idiots using a messaging platform with voip, video chat, file sharing, all rolled into one that doesn't blow anywhere near as many goats as most of the alternatives. What where those 1billion people thinking!

Re:Dumb F*cks

[thegarbz]

I'm sure your friends appreciate your constant judgement of them.

You're talking about a guy who dismisses 1/7th of the population of the world as not worth knowing. What makes you think this guy has any friends at all.

Re:Good to hear it's brilliant!

[thegarbz]

I'm not on it, or part of it, and proudly never have messed with FB.

And yet you're surprisingly eager to share this detail of your life with anyone who bothers surfing on Slashdot. This always amuses me about those people proud to not be on a social network often because they don't want to put up with or don't understand why others would share mundane things insist on sharing these details.

Re:Good to hear it's brilliant!

[Captain Splendid]

This is Slashdot, where you have to burnish your nerd badge with the blood of mindless tech sheep daily in order to maintain relevance.

Re:Dumb F*cks

[Captain Splendid]

But it doesn't meet the exacting specifications of nerds, so therefore must be thrown out completely. 1 Billion users is irrelevant in this case.

Re:Good to hear it's brilliant!

[cayenne8]

And yet you're surprisingly eager to share this detail of your life with anyone who bothers surfing on Slashdot. This always amuses me about those people proud to not be on a social network often because they don't want to put up with or don't understand why others would share mundane things insist on sharing these details.

Actually, my primary objection to social media, especially FB, is the abhorrent privacy issues involved with those sites. If nothing else, I'd rather just not feed their data collection engine voluntarily with my private data points.

I can actually see where it would be fun and useful in some circumstances, ESPECIALLY if you are running a business, but to me the tradeoff is not worth it.

I'd actually think about joining FB if I could get a business site ONLY...and not have to also have a personal account first....

Re:Good to hear it's brilliant!

[JackieBrown]

Reminds me of this college humor clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Does User = Unique Person?

[eepok]

I'm always suspicious of the term "User" when people say they have X number of users. Does "user" mean unique people? Does it mean "account"?

Because I have a hard time believing that 1/7 of the world population is actively on Facebook and I also know full well that there are millions of bot accounts whose likes are purchased.

Worse: Destroy standarts

[DrYak]

The situation is even worse:

They are in the process of destroying standards.

At some point in the past, Facebook used to have a XMPP gateway into their chat system. You could use it with (e.g.: Pidgin) and have the chat into your desktop computer (or phone if your smartphone supports XMPP, etc).

But eventually, Facebook dropped their XMPP support.

(Luckily for 3rd party support, pidgin developers have reverse engineered their JSON and XML based protocol used by the android application. So you can still use pidgin and any other application supporting libpurple plugins. But it's NOT a standard
And at least the Facebook company seems to be happy with this situation and let the pidgin dev continue their work).

WhatsApp is even worse. It *started* as a variant of XMPP/Jabber, then got progressively weirder (mainly, they use a different type of authentication protocole, and use a binary representation + phrase book to compress common XML structure to make it a binary ML).
These modification to the basic XMPP Jabber have been reverse engineered... ...but WhatsApp (even after the acquisition by Facebook) seem to be on a cursade to sue as many developpers of alternative clients as possible, and to prevent any development by kick-banning any detected alternative clients and perma-banning the corresponding GSM number. (e.g.: see the complains around WhatsUp alternative client for Sailfish OS).

And they are now further alienating their user base by forcing everybody to use only exclusively the Android or the iOS version.
By the end of the year, all other version (BlackBerry, Nokia, etc.) will be dropped, and their user left without any chance.
I undestand that they would like to concentrate effort on only the 2 most frequent platforms, which probably cover ~90% of their user base, but even it they don't develop an app, they could have left some API (e.g.: an XMPP gateway like facebook used to use before throwing it away) so that the "left behind" could at least use native 3rd party apps.

Does not surprise me

[brunes69]

I used to be an ardent user of Hangouts for VOIP and video calls home. Depending on quality of the hotel wifi, it was spotty, but usually worked OK. One trip it was on the fritz, so I tried Facebook instead. The voice and video quality was noticeably better. I switched back and forth between thema few times after, and every time, Facebook had far better quality on average. I no longer use Hangouts at all. I am not sure if the difference is in the protocol stack or in the compression algorithm, but at the end of the day, as a user I don't really care - what I care about is seeing my family clearly and having them hear me clearly, and Facebook Messenger is pretty much the best alternative to Skype in this regard. The difference of course is nearly everyone in the world already has Messenger installed, whereas Skype is an extra thing to ask people to load.

One billion?

[A Friendly Troll]

The world population is 7.4 billion.

Facebook cannot have 1 billion active Messenger users.

I think they might be counting daily usage, so someone who is on Facebook every day will count as 28-31 "users".