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More Than One Billion People Use Facebook's WhatsApp Service Every Day (whatsapp.com)
Facebook has announced that more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day. To put that in perspective, there are 7.5 billion people on this planet. And Facebook, whose marquee service itself is used by more than two billion people every month, says that 13.3 percent of the world's population is using Whatsapp every day.
..one billion people every day prove that they are DUMB. Back to you, Chet..
Europeans must be so angry.
They also claimed that 85% of all people over 15 in USA use facefart at least one time per month
love is just extroverted narcissism
The good news is 6.5 people have better sense.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
FAKE NEWS!!!
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...I only use slashdot and carrier pigeons. This might explain the drop-off in invitations to family Thanksgiving.
Facebook wants to get market share in this sector.
I am amazed that there are over thousand million active mobile phone lines. Wow, mobile internet is almost everywhere.
I went to see if TFA actually used that language out of curiosity over Facebook buying a service vs taking credit for it, but the only link is to a separate slashdot summary. I'm not sure which is more disappointing.
I'm in India. I can't name a single person that doesn't use WhatsApp. Even "dumb phones" have it. No one uses SMS.
When it came out it wanted 1 $ a year. I think I snagged a deal of 3$ for 5 years. How much it costs to provide the service, does it generate any revenue, are there any profits?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
just to make sure his fan boys don't hail him for the wrong thing
Yaaaay!
Well, not yet anyway.
But we can hope Zuckerburg visits the frozen land of Nador...
Suckers the lot of them.
How many of them are bots?
more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day
And if they started charging for use, even 1 cent per message, that number would drop by 99%
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The pervasiveness of marketing in mobile amazes me. It obviously works on the greater population though...
This sounds much, but they are speaking about american billions, which are only 10^9
Nice way to insult above 13% of the world's population!
The reason for this, of course, is that WhatsApp is the most cross-platform multimedia messaging service above SMS. It's not only there on iOS and Android, but also on Windows 10 Mobile, some Blackberry versions and I've even seen it on legacy phones. And with the most recent versions, it supports both audio and video internet calling, which is very handy if one wishes to call people overseas but doesn't want to pay for a phone plan overseas. While I FaceTime some family members who have iPhones, others I videocall using WhatsApp.
Also, while in the US, texts are generally free, it's not the same thing elsewhere in the world, so even there, WhatsApp is useful. Whats more, in WhatsApp, one can embed photos & videos in messages and send them. If one is using iMessage or Hangouts, one had better hope that the person on the other end has the same: an Android user may not want iMessage, and an iPhone user may not want Hangouts. With WhatsApp, all one has to do is confirm that the other person has WhatsApp on their phone.
200 million of those are from Brazil
WhatsApp is really handy, and not as a replacement for texting. You can make phone calls anywhere with good quality, sure, but everything does that. Where whatsapp excels is in groups, where all the messages go to everyone in the groups, and most people are in multiple groups. So my wife has a group with her siblings, and one with her family, and one with her cousins, so you wind up having these continuous threads of conversations, which include texts, voice memos, pictures, links, etc. More like a slack conversation, as they are persistent in nature.
And it's just as cancerous.
I'm so glad I can honestly tell that billion people I do not want to communicate with: "Sorry, but I am not on Facebook, and certainly not using their messenger".
Facebook should really separate completely from the open Internet and keep its users in a walled, electro-fenced garden. The Internet is just a better place with Facebook users staying amongst their kind.
I don't have any friends that use it, I have only heard that if you meet people on Tinder and you don't want to give them your real number yet (or keep chatting in the shit Tinder interface) you get them to ad you on WhatsApp. I didn't realise there were people who used it as an way to contact their actual friends instead of SMS.
My cat who lives on Uranus uses Whatapp when communicating with inter dimensional entities. So this articles claim must be true.
My employer (a bank) wants me to use WA, mostly to hand down on-the-spot management decrees and demand feedback all hours of the day. Even though there are strict policies in place regarding business communication that on face value seem to exclude it's use (bank secrets and all that). The "requirement" is of course not stated anywhere explicitly, but the management put out strong hints. And boy do they assume EVERYBODY has it, as they simply add joiners' numbers to groups without prior asking or even notification.
I've never installed it, since I am happy not to share my (private) address book with the WA company, and have sufficient call minutes and texts included in my contract for my purposes, and am still happy to send pictures and other files around using e-mail (which is client-agnostic and can actually be sent to computers (convenient) without them needing a SIM card/MSISDN number, but is ALSO available from my mobile).
So I am still happy with my 5-year-old smartphone, that doesn't have an OS version high enough to get onto the app store or install many apps any more (battery life seems to last much longer too with all the age-crippled snoopware).
I could of course go buy an extra device + contract just for the bank's convenience, but how screwed-up is that? (In my locale the exchange rate to the USD is not favourable and most smartphone cost slightly more than a trivial amount.) Besides, there are tax implications...
Well, I have started sending out resumes this week.
Fair point. You are describing a business case. I was describing a personal case: I have family members that have both Galaxies and iPhones, and very often, we like to share not just messages, but also photos & videos. My parents struggle w/ email, but have somewhat figured out at least how to VIEW things in WhatsApp
For what you are describing, it seems pretty inappropriate. Like you said, email is more suitable, and even something like Skype.
Where are all these people? The ones I know use Viber or plain SMS for IM.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife