251–260 of 831 posts
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
Pretty amazing that this is precisely what Microsoft paid for Hotmail in 1998 : $400 million for 10 million users = $40 / User. [1] The parallels are striking : Whatsapp is to messaging today what Hotmail was to messaging in the late '90s. [1] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-206717.html
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im curious, what do americans use instead?
same old texting.
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
How did WhatsApp gain traction? Presumably most of their users already use facebook, which offers the same messaging functionality as WhatsApp. So why do people use WhatsApp instead of Facebook for messaging?
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How'd you get your friends to move over to Telegram? I'm trying to get that ball moving with my circle of friends.
Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service. If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.
Sometimes I think HTTP and SMTP are only limping along because there's a large enough enterprise base that doesn't want to see any changes at all.
Maybe that presents a defense (get your competing protocol entrenched in corporate IT), but not many technologies get birthed out to the consumer space from the enterprise space the way http and smtp did.
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Except that people weren't paying to get a Hotmail account. WhatsApp users pay $1/year, so their revenues are around that of Twitter's.
you mean $1 once when they first install it? the 'pay this amount' was a well known scam message
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/20/3787472/whatsapp-for-ios-...
$16B for something I've never even heard of. I feel like I'm living under a pile of rocks.
Don't feel bad; no one really uses them in the US (except us foreigners to communicate with friends and family abroad). They are the de-facto messaging service in the rest of the world (except for China).
FWIW, I'm in the UK, and I'm not aware of anyone who uses it here, either. I too have heard the name mentioned once or twice in the past, usually for undesirable reasons related to things like security or privacy. Even looking them up today, I don't quite see the attraction: what is the USP here?