450 million active users, but who are they? I've never heard of the app or anyone who uses it, and I usually am in the slightly-more-hip-to-technology-although-no-longer-a-teen subset. I'd like to see some demographic breakdown that I didn't find in a scan of the article. Is it used by people who have devices that don't have messaging (like iPads)?
It's very popular in Australia and Asia. I used it in Australia to communicate easily with my parents without paying 40cents/text. I think everyone I knew in Australia had it and used it constantly. It's especially popular in areas where not everyone has unlimited text message plans. Also, my coworker is from Sri Lanka and he uses it to talk to all his friends back home as well. We actually used it to solve problems with one of our units via WhatsApp when he was on vacation. :P
Yup. And data. You create a whatsapp account with your real phone number - that's how you connect with others so easily. No usernames, etc. It just pulls your phone contact list and checks to see if people have accounts.
You don't know anyone from the Pacific Rim. Everybody I know who even knows someone in the Eastern Hemisphere has Whatsapp installed. I had to use it for a while to talk to buddies in Thailand. The people I know who use it regularly are in Thailand, Taiwan and India. It's a useful little app, if naggy. Basically a hipper implementation of Skype.
I don't know about America, but here in the Netherlands, everyone has Whatsapp. Not just teens, my parents have it, cousins, basically everyone with a smartphone. Now, it needs to be noted that we have the highest percentage of Whatsapp users per capita (AFAIK), but it is the default messaging app. Especially groupchats are plentiful and while most conversations are just dicking around, it is very useful from time to time. And fuck, I liked Wapp in part because it wasn't Facebook. I wonder, is this a panicky buy by Facebook, fearing imminent decline? Or a social web bubble about to burst? 19 billion is a gigantic amount of money, that's for sure.
Just to add some more context to the question of "who uses whatsapp", in South Africa basically everyone with a smartphone uses it. It's a verb in the same sense as "google". A while after BlackBerry started the adoption of smartphones with this baby it started to gain traction because it was cross-platform, unlike BBM at the time. I use whatsapp to talk to friends, family, my debating students who live in a township, and my boss a few times. It's pretty ubiquitous. Strangely, I have never paid for whatsapp. They keep extending the free period. I always assumed it's because they don't expect people in developing countries to be able to pay at all (not many people use PayPal/Google Wallet). Everyone I spoke to today seemed at least skeptical of the merger.
The most interesting part of this for me was that after he was VP of Engineering at Yahoo! Twitter and Facebook turned him down for a job.
Have you ever tried using Yahoo! Mail? I have an account there, for the only reason that I've had it since the mid-late nineties. They keep making it more complex and less useful. I would say one out of 10 times I try to check it, it won't load for god knows what reason. Similarly when you send mail, you often get an error message, so you resend the message only to find that you've just sent the same thing twice. Brilliant. I wouldn't hire anyone from Yahoo! who is in charge of software either.
If it weren't for fantasy football, which they pretty much dominate, I don't know what service they would offer that people actually care about. And this: This is such a backwards corporate strategy that many companies beyond Yahoo! employ. There was a great expose on the dismantling of Sears that I read (on Hubski, I think) that basically accused them of the same thing, which is to divide and conquer within your own company, forcing your individual business units to compete with one another rather than to cooperate against outside competitors.Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn't given the resources that were dedicated to other products.
They have done every single thing wrong in the last... shit, the whole last decade now, and yet, for some mindblowing reason, they are still in the top five most popular websites worldwide and, some months, are the top websites in the US
Oh man, I remember when there password reset was just a postal code and a security question. Great times. pg has a great write-up on Yahoo and it's fall from grace, but I don't know that I would not hire anyone from Yahoo who was in charge of software. Makes you wonder what his interviews went like.
Thanks for sharing that article - great read.