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What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

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Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#41

Post by sathyabhat »

fmavituna wrote: post #38

Whatsapp is the perfect example of "solve something people need". You don't need to solve it "perfectly" or "10 times better". Combined with network and lock-in effects, it's a great business on a good enough application and an obvious idea. Which makes it even more impressive. P.S. I think many tried to do similar things before or after but failed. So I'm not quite sure what make whatsapp stand out. Any ideas? First…

I think it's cross-platform support plus the fact that you didn't have to sign up to create yet another account id that led to it's success. You install the app, run it and bam! Whoever's already using it is ready to talk, without having to invite/add and such stuff

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#42

Post by fmavituna »

sathyabhat wrote: post #41
fmavituna wrote: post #38

Whatsapp is the perfect example of "solve something people need". You don't need to solve it "perfectly" or "10 times better". Combined with network and lock-in effects, it's a great business on a good enough application and an obvious idea. Which makes it even more impressive. P.S. I think many tried to do similar things before or after but failed. So I'm not quite sure what make whatsapp stand out. Any ideas? First…

I think it's cross-platform support plus the fact that you didn't have to sign up to create yet another account id that led to it's success. You install the app, run it and bam! Whoever's already using it is ready to talk, without having to invite/add and such stuff

Well spotted, that particular simple design choice seems like increase the adaption significantly.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#43

Post by st0p »

fakeer wrote: post #37
kang wrote: post #13

My friends here in India use it because its free the first year. Almost everyone I know is on Whatsapp. But the moment they have to pay, everyone will switch. I know of nobody in person (who own the latest pretty expensive smartphones, except iphones which are not big in India) to have "ever paid for any" app. Its not about being stingy, but more of a mentality where we know a hack/solution/pirated version/alternativ…

Besides, there's a small(very small or even very tiny) subset of mobile users who are actually using WhatsApp. Not even 50% of my smart phone using friends have 3G activated. Not 100% have Internet on mobile. So, you have to use SMS anyway, if you require messaging. + WhatsApp is very much broken - a broken identity management is one of the many broken things. I ended up being textually abused by two persons when I f…

I don't know where you live, but here in the Netherlands everybody is using it...

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#44

Post by incision »

sathyabhat wrote: post #41
fmavituna wrote: post #38

Whatsapp is the perfect example of "solve something people need". You don't need to solve it "perfectly" or "10 times better". Combined with network and lock-in effects, it's a great business on a good enough application and an obvious idea. Which makes it even more impressive. P.S. I think many tried to do similar things before or after but failed. So I'm not quite sure what make whatsapp stand out. Any ideas? First…

I think it's cross-platform support plus the fact that you didn't have to sign up to create yet another account id that led to it's success. You install the app, run it and bam! Whoever's already using it is ready to talk, without having to invite/add and such stuff

The lack of a sign-up is huge. Off the top head, for myself and my circle of contacts I'd say we're 4-5x less likely to try something recommended by each other if it necessitates signing up.

Despite what seem to be a surprising number of detractors here, lets not forgot that it's a pretty good product - fast, stable, nice enough looking and very reliable.

It's also worth noting that if Google Talk / Messenger weren't such an inconsistent / unreliable mess, I'd never have gone for looking another means of messaging.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#46

Post by shmerl »

Repeating my comments from the previous thread which was deleted for some reason:

Why would people be OK with constant security risk, but not OK with one time registration step for normal XMPP service? XMPP clients are available for all major desktop and mobile platforms. So it's a really interesting psychological hook that Whatsapp developers catch their users on here, offering a completely inferior solution, with selling it of for the fake attraction. And it's a really nasty thing to do - to play on people's ignorance regarding security.

So why would Facebook want to buy this monstrosity? The only valid reason could be to convert it to proper XMPP, then I'd applaud them, but on the other hand Facebook's own IM service isn't federated, which defeats the purpose. So it doesn't look like it can improve Whatsapp in any way.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#47

Post by shmerl »

fmavituna wrote: post #38

Whatsapp is the perfect example of "solve something people need". You don't need to solve it "perfectly" or "10 times better". Combined with network and lock-in effects, it's a great business on a good enough application and an obvious idea. Which makes it even more impressive. P.S. I think many tried to do similar things before or after but failed. So I'm not quite sure what make whatsapp stand out. Any ideas? First…

Whatsapp is a perfect example of how not to solve something in a crooked way. Whatsapp developers should be ashamed for exploiting people's ignorance, and for luring users with fake convenience of skipping one time registration step for the price of constant security risk.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#48

Post by shmerl »

zack12 wrote: post #30

Whatsapp is a little gem on a company which no one talk about. It's hard to get inside information about the company on the internet, and maybe that's the geniuses of co-founders. They don;t talk so much about the company and instead focus on building a quality product. On a comparative note, the product is actually not so good(maybe because of the sacle they are operating on). They have problems with their backend,…

Why would you call a gem, a company which proliferates insecure walled IM gardens (based on non compliant XMPP which precludes using any normal clients), instead of advancing secure and federated IM networks based on standard XMPP interoperable with any compliant client? Their approach is really ugly.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#49

Post by fakeer »

st0p wrote: post #43
fakeer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides, there's a small(very small or even very tiny) subset of mobile users who are actually using WhatsApp. Not even 50% of my smart phone using friends have 3G activated. Not 100% have Internet on mobile. So, you have to use SMS anyway, if you require messaging. + WhatsApp is very much broken - a broken identity management is one of the many broken things. I ended up being textually abused by two persons when I f…

I don't know where you live, but here in the Netherlands everybody is using it...

I've mentioned in the comment that I live in India, my bad if I didn't. I think OC had mentioned had mentioned it too.

Re: What’s Up With Whatsapp? Facebook Might Want To Buy It, That’s What

#50

Post by shmerl »

incision wrote: post #44
sathyabhat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's cross-platform support plus the fact that you didn't have to sign up to create yet another account id that led to it's success. You install the app, run it and bam! Whoever's already using it is ready to talk, without having to invite/add and such stuff

The lack of a sign-up is huge. Off the top head, for myself and my circle of contacts I'd say we're 4-5x less likely to try something recommended by each other if it necessitates signing up. Despite what seem to be a surprising number of detractors here, lets not forgot that it's a pretty good product - fast, stable, nice enough looking and very reliable. It's also worth noting that if Google Talk / Messenger weren't…

This puzzles me. Let's compare one time action of registration for secure XMPP service (where you have an option of choosing your own ID (JID) and password which you can change later), as well as an option of using a client with extra security like OTR for text messages and ZRTP for audio/video conferencing, with the client which lets you skipping one time step of registration, but gives it for the price of broken insecure approach of using predefined IDs and passwords based on the device ID?

I'd say constant security risk outweighs the "burden" of one time registration step which is a pretty familiar for any user on the web and takes just a few seconds to complete. It's not a decent thing to do for Whatsapp developers to play on users ignorance.

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