Is $19,000,000,000 what it costs to stay relevant in social media? Is perpetually buying every “next big thing” that comes along the only way to stay at the top of the social media heap?
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My income is already taxed too, and so is the car dealer’s. How come I have to pay sales tax on my new car, but Facebook doesn’t have to pay any on its new company?
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Yea, but you know, if I go to the corner mart and buy a bottle of juice, I pay sales tax. They should at least have to pay sales tax. After all, 5% of $19 billion is $950 million. That would pay for a lot of mass surveillance!
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There doesn’t seem anything that distinguishes Whatsapp from other chat/messaging apps like Viber, Qeep, Telegram, etc
I referenced this earlier in a conversation, and was smacked firmly on the nose by it. $4 billion of it is straight up cash. Sure, the majority is Pretend Internet Money, but…$4,000,000,000? In American currency?
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“There doesn’t seem anything that distinguishes Whatsapp from other chat/messaging apps like Viber, Qeep, Telegram, etc”
Whatsapp uses your phone number for authentication, instead of the usual username/password dance. Also, they are ad-free, they respect your privacy and retain no user data, and they make their money by charging $1 per year after the first year. Most of the dozens of other messaging apps out there make money with ads and your standard privacy invasion/data mining, like Facebook.
In other news, a virus going around Silicon Valley has been shown to permanently destroy the sense of irony in those it infects.
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User count, probably.
so when do we expect Facebook to close it to force us to use its own Facebook Chat
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Damn! And I enjoyed using that app 
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Now they just need 10,000,000,000 users.
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The maths are strong with this one.
why not use Viber?
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Yes, I think so.
I forgot about the phone number part… Makes it easy to find people, but it also means giving up one of the few pieces of private data I have left – my mobile number.
Yep, Facebook is now going to have privacy-unconscious persons’ phone numbers to better track people with along with everyone that’s in their phone.
Yep, so if you are someone’s contact in their phone, welcome to Facebook.
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I understand the usefulness of texting (although flummoxed by 1k of messages the average teenager can do in a day) but the desire to send dumb-ass emoticons, sound effects and pure garbage totally escapes me.
Nice business reporting, Xeni!
It’s the group messages that made me finally give in and join. Makes organising an after work pint much easier when everyone can see all the replies.
Sure, email does the same, as does a whole bunch of other messaging apps, but this was the one that hit critical mass amongst my friends. Having a client with basically no signup that works on pretty much everyone’s phone helped as well.
By comparison, enough people I know never went on facebook, that it never became the dominant way of organising meetups. Sure, I missed out on the odd party because it was only mentioned on the book of faces, but most of the time if someone was organising something they’d post it on face book, then text/email everyone as well.
Oh, sure, we’ll figure out a work-around. But it’s up to them: they tell us which one they want to use, and we’ll use it.
Ding ding ding…we have a winner.
THAT’s what they’re buying: our names attached to our cell numbers.
Damn.
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