721–730 of 831 posts
If you have teenager offsprings like me (I've a 13 years old son) you can understand that better maybe. I heard the sentence "We don't need Facebook since there is Whatsapp" an endless number of times from him and his friends. From my point of view at first this didn't made a lot of sense, I considered Whatsapp a no-cost SMS replacement. The reality is that Groups are a killer feature: my son's school class has a gro…
And you can't even turn off Group notifications...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they're buying it per current user. It's either about paying for future users (granted, triple the user base and it's still a lot) or a game of defense against a potential competitor. They bought the photo company at what seemed an outrageous amount in part to co-opt a competitor. In the end it was profitable. They alter their feed to look more Twitter-like, encouraging people to avoid the competitor. I…
>They bought the photo company at what seemed an outrageous amount in part to co-opt a competitor. In the end it was profitable. Are you talking about Instagram? Unless I've been living under a rock I haven't heard or read anything that says they're profitable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit, I'm in the UK, everybody I know uses WhatsApp.
Rubbish! I'm in the UK, and I've never even heard of WhatsApp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, SMS was huge in Germany as well, there were unlimited plans etc., still, today everyone uses WhatsApp. Group messages, broadcasts, media, cross-platform, and it's of course easier to convince people to use WhatsApp than Facebook. I lived in the US for a while, and I can't really come up with any reason why it should be different there. Only that way more people are on Facebook (and those are also way mo…
SMS was (still is) huge in the UK too, but all of my friends started using WhatsApp because you could send pictures to each other on WhatsApp without having to use MMS which cost more, was always a hassle to set up and wasn't available on every phone back in the beginning.
Could someone explain to me why WhatsApp is more popular then say Skype or any of the numerous competitors. I looked at it for the first time today. I find the design of the app to be a bit poor, at least on iOS6. Overall it's a good app that functions well, from what I can see. But so does Skype, for instance. Also, the lack of a PC/MAC client is kind of a letdown. I know it's silly to argue with facts, clearly peop…
A lot of people on HN talk about how Facebook is pointless and on its way out. And it's true, Facebook probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people who are steeped in an email culture. Young adults are not . Facebook is far and away the dominant messaging platform. Email in high school was for spam, communicating with teachers, and passing attachments ONLY. Short, synchorous messages that you didn't mind typing wit…
Yeah, looking at this site's user base, a bunch of late 20s-30s tech people, they may be the place to see what some of the next big things may be, but they are not always the place to look for what is the thing right now.
If this guarantees FB winning the messaging war, then it's worth it. I still think that Facebook needs to buy SnapChat, Line and WeChat to close the deal and fulfill their dream of connecting the world.
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…
I think FB's high profile acquisitions are driven by fear of survival first it was Instagram and now its Whatsapp, which was clearly a very great threat, I am sure, it contributed to at least some double digit percentage drop in daily time spend especially in India... unlike say Google's acquisitions, which are typically done to grow things think YouTube or Android or Robotics companies...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SMS was (still is) huge in the UK too, but all of my friends started using WhatsApp because you could send pictures to each other on WhatsApp without having to use MMS which cost more, was always a hassle to set up and wasn't available on every phone back in the beginning.
I'm in the UK and I'd never heard of WhatsApp until now. I wonder if a lot of these people who say 'X app is big in my country' actually just mean 'X app is popular within my social circle'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also XMPP is non-performant and verbose - these things matter as far a protocols go.
More importantly, XMPP has problems delivering the text-message-like experience. It's more of a live-chat protocol. If you want to receive messages when you're offline, things rapidly become a mess.