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

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]

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....

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.