Facebook to buy WhatsApp For $16 Billion

Lysander said:
One major thing - to generate revenue. Either by selling people's information or selling information to the NSA/US Government. There may be small ads integrated at some point in the future. Or some other underhand way as yet unknown to us or that will never been known over the radar.

One thing's for certain, all people's conversations will now be recorded [if they haven't already been] and passed over to the authorities.
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I'd love to spend 1 day with your brain.
 
bsoltan said:
They aren't buying the 'App'. That's just part of it, they're buying the connectivity of people. Who's talking to whom and how often, how does that trend against things happening in the world, possibly where a user is when they're chatting, what time of day it gets used most etc. All analytical stuff that can go to advertisers.

None of that requires a change to the service provided.
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What good is all that real-time data if advertisers can't immediately capitalise by feeding a directed ad at that person?
 
Whatsapp is great for group messaging and sending media to groups of people in "chats". I really do hope they don't kill this with advertising. Like others have said though, I'd expect it will get merged with facebook messenger, crowded with ads and that will be that.

The beauty of Whatsapp is its shear simplicity to add people to conversations and share media in a clutter free environment. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
 
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I use WhatsApp a hell of a lot more than SMS, I have unlimited SMS, but WhatsApp and even Hangouts (which less of my contacts use) is great to use I like being able to see if a message has been received, if a contact is online, the easy way of sending pictures and video and even sending the odd audio message is super handy in WhatsApp, all on WiFi is handy!

I won't stop using it even though I'm slightly shocked that facebook bought them!
 
G|mp said:
Don't get me wrong, I've used it, once, twice maybe. I just don't see the real appeal for it when similar is built into every phone nowadays anyway.
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Seriously, give it another good go - every single person (embarrassingly, including me) has said the exact same thing as you, before that realisation of how good it is.

It tells you who else has it in your phonebook (across Blackberry, Android, iOS, Windows phones, Symbian), you can send pictures instantly, videos, sounds, locations, it tells you when things have been delivered, it tells you when people were last "online", you can set statuses, you can mute things, you can have group chats, you can send all of the above to an entire group, you can use it with no signal, it's all but free, you can use it abroad for nothing but data.

Sure there are other built in apps to do this kind of stuff, but if you:-

- Want to send a picture to someone, you have to use the archaic MMS (if your settings are correct - and you'll probably be billed 40p for it), email (a lot of people don't have email on their phone/you don't have their email address/things go into spam and never get seen again etc), or a manufacturers built in IP messaging system, which means you can only communicate with people who have the same type of phone as you.
- Want to send a short video clip....email only/manufacturers proprietry
- Want to send a message - SMS/email/manufacturers proprietry
- Want to organise something via a group message - Email/manufacturers proprietry

Or

You could just use Whatsapp which does all of the above and puts them in the same place so you can actually follow what's happening. Whatsapp does nothing new - but just puts it in a nice package and makes it much much easier to use than before. In fairness, i'm suprised Apple/Google/Microsoft didn't buy it out when it was in it's infancy. I could see whatsapp was becoming big about 3 years ago.

And no, i don't work for Whatsapp's marketing department :p
 
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Resident said:
With facebook in control, if you really believe that won't change then you're a fool. It's like a political party claiming they won't raise taxes in the run up to an election.

There's no way that Zuckerberg isn't going to find a way to add more monetising to Whatapp. He needs to justify to the shareholders spending that amount and show that by spending that he's going to make more out of it.

69p at current market is $1.14 so IF it stays as is and IF every user pays 69p a year to use Whatapp. it would take around 37 years just to recoup the purchase price.
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You're debating something that I haven't said. Of course they're going to monetise it, they're a business. What I'm saying is that they'd be mental to put adverts into it. A far more likely use is link up WhatsApp and Facebook accounts behind the scenes and use conversation history for targeted ads on Facebook.

And it's like a political party. lol. Politics is a bankrupt venture. This is business. :rolleyes:

AtreuS said:
Well yes i know, he has to have a plan to use it somehow... but you keep saying the App will not change in any way yet offer up no ideas on just why he would buy it if he has no plan to alter it in any way.
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Well, that isn't what I said? I pointed out that they claimed they will not be intruding with ads in the face of people saying that was the only way to monetise it, which is actually a really old fashioned and ineffective way of doing so.
 
slightly concerned long term as obviously facebook must have a plan for this although in the short term it looks like business as usual.

The advantage of Whats app for me is it's platform independent and allows group messaging so you can plan an event with a group of friends and everyone can easily see all the replies without relying on reply all in emails as we used to do.

I also use it for picture messaging as paying for mms seems crazy and iMessage is an unreliable bag of nails with pictures.
 
Gaygle said:
Seriously, give it another good go - every single person (embarrassingly, including me) has said the exact same thing as you, before that realisation of how good it is.

It tells you who else has it in your phonebook (across Blackberry, Android, iOS, Windows phones, Symbian), you can send pictures instantly, videos, sounds, locations, it tells you when things have been delivered, it tells you when people were last "online", you can set statuses, you can mute things, you can have group chats, you can send all of the above to an entire group, you can use it with no signal, it's all but free, you can use it abroad for nothing but data.

Sure there are other built in apps to do this kind of stuff, but if you:-

- Want to send a picture to someone, you have to use the archaic MMS (if your settings are correct - and you'll probably be billed 40p for it), email (a lot of people don't have email on their phone/you don't have their email address/things go into spam and never get seen again etc), or a manufacturers built in IP messaging system, which means you can only communicate with people who have the same type of phone as you.
- Want to send a short video clip....email only/manufacturers proprietry
- Want to send a message - SMS/email/manufacturers proprietry
- Want to organise something via a group message - Email/manufacturers proprietry

Or

You could just use Whatsapp which does all of the above and puts them in the same place so you can actually follow what's happening. Whatsapp does nothing new - but just puts it in a nice package and makes it much much easier to use than before. In fairness, i'm suprised Apple/Google/Microsoft didn't buy it out when it was in it's infancy. I could see whatsapp was becoming big about 3 years ago.

And no, i don't work for Whatsapp's marketing department :p
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I don't need to give it a go though and that's my point, I installed it ages ago and have used it twice maybe.

I don't really send pics over messages and if I need to send a video clip or have a mass conversation it can be done through Facebook. imessage tells me if a message has been delivered, read etc.

I'm not knocking it and can see how it's useful for some people but like I originally said, I don't use it as my normal SMS can do everything I need it to do.
 
Unless I'm missing something, the only way thing that Whatsapp lacks is the ability to access it from a desktop pc/laptop/internet browser. So if you don't have your phone you can still upload messages via another means. Unimportant issue though.
 
I love using whatsapp, got plenty of group chats where I can exchange inappropriate pictures and videos with people who use iOS and Android.
 
physichull said:
Unless I'm missing something, the only way thing that Whatsapp lacks is the ability to access it from a desktop pc/laptop/internet browser. So if you don't have your phone you can still upload messages via another means. Unimportant issue though.
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on a comparrison of voip/text apps I was looking at they said whatsapp had the ability to send messages from a browser? I guess if that's true they will add the ability to facebook which some of you already said you wouldn;t like them being connected

some of the alternatives have desktop apps though which I guess is far better
 
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Theophany said:
And it's like a political party. lol. Politics is a bankrupt venture. This is business. :rolleyes:
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Thanks, truly thanks for making me laugh out loud for the first time today. Your naivety is really amusing.

You really think that corporations and governments are separate entities in today's world?
 
Resident said:
What good is all that real-time data if advertisers can't immediately capitalise by feeding a directed ad at that person?
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There must be a cross over with 400m whatsapp users and 1b Facebook users.

Facebook has been asking for my phone number for 'security' for a while now. Now they have it, along with whatever else they can pull to my account from whatsapp.

Basically what Theopany is saying.

If they change it then all the users will just flock to another platform, like Viber. Its not like you have your social history tied up in it like if you wanted to leave behind a FB account. They 'break' the current magic formula and the users will drop.
 
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