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Dopefish
on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:00AM
from the when-will-this-darn-bubble-pop-already? dept.
from the when-will-this-darn-bubble-pop-already? dept.
lubricus writes "Facebook announced plans to acquire WhatsApp for four billion cash, plus 12 billion in Facebook shares.
Additionally, WhatsApp employees and founders will receive three billion in restricted stock which will vest in four years. Facebook also agreed to a one billion dollar break up fee.
WhatsApp says they have message volume which approaches the global SMS volume, and hope to have one billion users. Even at those figures, Facebook is paying $16 per user.
I'm guessing WhatsApp will send Snapchat developers a cake."
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Facebook to Buy WhatsApp for 16 Billion
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Litron286 on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:03AM
Well, I guess that is it....
Can anyone suggest any good alternatives?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kelerei on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:15AM
To be avoided: WeChat (part of Tencent/Naspers), Hangouts (Google), BBM (Blackberry), ChatOn (Samsung), Skype (Microsoft). Say no to their corporate overlords, and yes to privacy and freedom.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deif on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:20AM
Unfortunately Telegram doesn't have clients for Symbian, Blackberry or Windows Phone, and from what I've heard the have no plans to support those platforms.
There are still a significant ammount of users of those platforms around (specially in countries outside the US).
I myself still use a Symbian phone. I can't justify spending money to a new phone when this one still works fine. I even write programs for it with Qt (for personal use).
Here in Spain many people is increasingly being aware of Telegram, but many end uninstalling it cause they can't communicate with some of their contacts (some even say about 1/3 of their contacts use something else than iOS or Andriod).
∀(x, y ∈ A ∪ B; x ≠ y) x² - y² ≥ 0
(Score: 4, Interesting) by epl on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:26AM
Not to be "that guy", but I'm still going to say it. If you write QT apps for your phone, you could try your hand at writing a client, they do have an API. I can understand them not wanting to write apps for devices that haven't been made for years, but they do offer you the chance to roll something yourself if you are so inclined and someone already has for WP.
It's obviously going to be your choice if you find it worth your effort or would prefer to find a service that already caters to your existing ecosystem.
(Score: 2, Funny) by dotdotdot on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:29AM
Wow! Two mentions of Windows Phone and no mindless, knee-jerk comments bashing it? I'm liking my Soylent more and more everyday.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tomtomtom on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:32AM
There was an interesting discussion [ycombinator.com] a while back on HN about Telegram. I'm not sure I'd trust it so much. TextSecure [whispersystems.org] seems better, is fully open source (including the server) and e.g. seems to care about issues like "how do I make sure that the TextSecure server doesn't need to know ALL my contacts". No iOS app just yet though.
(Score: 1) by omoc on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:56AM
IIRC whispersystems was acquired by twitter? I haven't followed them after that
(Score: 1) by song-of-the-pogo on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:57PM
Yes, apparently they were acquired by Twitter on Nov. 28, 2011. It would appear that they open-sourced their software not long after their Twitter acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_Systems [wikipedia.org]
Regarding WhatsApp: I tried it quite some time ago, but never made regular use of it and haven't touched it in a couple of years. Even though I don't use it I am disappointed about the Facebook purchase. I'm tired of seeing service after service get absorbed, amoeba-fashion, by large players like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Furthermore, as I have no interest in ever joining Facebook and, in fact, would like to stay as far away from it as I reasonably can, I'm a little worried about my old, dangling WhatsApp account and am wondering what Facebook will glean from it. I suppose I should've made a more conscientious effort to clean up after myself.
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
(Score: 3, Informative) by jaap.h on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:28PM
If you are considering using telegram (I've never used it myself), you should be aware that there are some potential issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913456 [ycombinator.com] andc hallenge/ [thoughtcrime.org]
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-
(Score: 5, Informative) by drgibbon on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:23AM
Any public XMPP service (list here [xmpp.net], or here [jabber.at]).
As for clients;
ChatSecure on Android [guardianproject.info]
ChatSecure on iPhone/iPad [chatsecure.org]
Jitsi [jitsi.org] for desktop.
They all support OTR, and Jitsi has ZRTP for voice/video calling.
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 3, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:39AM
There's also Freetalk (console) and Psi, though the latter misses OTR. Psi-plus is the latter with OTR support and Jingle (audio/video), though I havn't tried it (the AUR version is broken).
I love XMPP and would love to see it get more traction. It's frustrating that both WhatsApp and Kik both use the protocol but have butchered it so it isn't compatible with other servers.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by linsane on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:24AM
First roflmao for me here, thank you and I will send over the bill for the damage to my phone for the coffee i just spat on it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:28AM
What do you need it for? Honest question; I somehow seem to have survived without even getting to know what it does.
(Score: 4, Informative) by blackest_k on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:49AM
basically its a free alternative to instant messaging, very popular with young teens who often have smart phones handed down by their parents, wifi access, and not necessarily even a sim card.
Facebook isn't so popular these days with teens thanks to facebook recording everything forever, something facebook is quite aware of.
It's likely facebook have just killed whatsapp as they are likely to start data mining it just like facebook. I don't know if facebook now has access to whatsapp user data from before they bought the company at that price probably yes.
It's likely that whatsapp is now going to lose users because of this buyout snapchat or something similar may see an increase in users.
Teens are fairly smart, they value privacy, especially from their parents.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:29AM
And what exactly is wrong with ol' Jabber? I just don't get today's netizens.
(Score: 1) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:42AM
What's exactly wrong with good old IRC? Works as well today as it did when I first used it in 1993.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 4, Informative) by ticho on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:21AM
As much as I love IRC, in its usual form it is not suitable for mobile messaging, for simple reason - if you're offline, server won't save incoming messages until you log back in. XMPP does this. :)
And no, MemoServ, NoteServ and other bolt-on gimmicks don't count.
(Score: 1) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:04PM
ssh + screen. My irssi never quits, I can use it from anywhere.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:51PM
Yes, I am using the very same setup, but I wouldn't dare push it to an average Internet user.
(Score: 1) by akinliat on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:43PM
First, kudos for an elegant messaging solution. More people should use screen.
Doesn't this lose the push functionality, though?
I always thought that this was a central feature for messaging apps like BBM or WhatsApp (or even SMS). Heck, even though I've no general need for push messaging myself, the one thing I do use it for (server fault monitoring), I use because I want the alert to get to me ASAP.
(Score: 1) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:11PM
As I've never has push functionality, I don't miss it. But sirc and irssi are scriptable, so you can bounce selected messages to other distribution networks if you want. (Assuming they can be scripted, but things like SMSs can trivially.)
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 1) by akinliat on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:37AM
Huh, interesting. I suppose I just got used to having push.
My first smartphone was a Blackberry, and I stayed with them until I was sure that RIM was circling the drain. The two best things about the handset were the great, big, real keyboard, and the efficient push technology.
When I finally made the switch to Android, I was shocked at the amount of battery and bandwidth it took to accomplish the things that even that first handset did with ease.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:47AM
If you're in the US, then SMS's were made utterly useless and unwanted by the carriers right from the start - charging the *recipient* for them too - sheesh, that's braindead (what could possibly go wrong...)!??!.
If you're in a civilised part of the world, SMS's became practically free, and the push mechanism of choice, decades ago.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 1) by akinliat on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:31PM
I am in the US, and I do pay for incoming texts, but it's all of $3 for the first 100, and an extra $2 for the next 900, so that is not my problem with SMS.
I've just never liked it.
At first it was the annoyance of using a phone keyboard to type 160-character messages -- annoying all around. Then, once smartphones ameliorated that chore, it was the inelegance of an entirely separate data channel coming to my phone. A phone that already had a TCP/IP stack. The only way that SMS wasn't totally inferior was the push capability.
Ever since phones all started having internet capability, I've wondered why they don't just scrap SMS and use the channel as a ping to wake up a data connection. You'd get an efficient push capability that you could theoretically use for almost any connection.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 24 2014, @06:57PM
Europe got SMSs a decade before it got GPRS, so it really was the best thing since sliced bread. US carriers nt adopting GSM, and making SMSs prohibitively expensive when they did means that your perspective will indeed be different. But that's not SMS's fault, that's the US carriers.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 1) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:38PM
Of course that only works if you have a running computer connected to the internet on which you have sufficient rights to ssh in (and a router that is configured to allow it). I can imagine a lot of teens don't have that (they probably have a computer, but they may not be allowed to have it running and connected to the internet while away from home; not to mention that the majority would not have the slightest idea of how to set up an ssh server anyway).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Jaruzel on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:36AM
My daughter, and her collection of same-age friends all reacted to the Facebook buyout news by immediately dumping whatsapp (which up until then was their platform of choice) and switching to BBM[1] this morning.
-Jar
[1] No, I don't get that choice either. Teenagers huh ?
Wash at 40°C, and hand dry only. My MUD Engine [jaruzel.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by hitsuji on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:15AM
BBM was always popular with teenagers in the UK. Now there is an Android client it becomes an attractive alternative to Whatsapp. I use it myself to chat with my daughter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2014, @11:41AM
peMq1B vquwtsrhrluj [vquwtsrhrluj.com], [url=http://snxavgiwjprh.com/]snxavgiwjprh[/url], [link=http://efiijjtlqpxa.com/]efiijjtlqpxa[/link], http://djiqxexkzwsk.com/ [djiqxexkzwsk.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Litron286 on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:06AM
Gf likes to use it, personally I don't care
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:30AM
To WhatsApp or to Facebook?
I'd never even heard of WhatsApp, but unfortunately a lot of my friends are on Facebook. I seem to remember Diaspora being only one of many open alternatives a few years back. If the Soylent community can spin up a new Slashcode site in a week, can we get some traction on solving the Twitter/Facebook microblogging duopoly problem?
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 3, Informative) by CowMan on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:38AM
The alternative for microblogging is Status.Net; it's pretty easy to configure (if you have your own server). Similarly, the answer to instant messaging is (still) XMPP. Diaspora is probably the nicest looking social network alternative, Frendica/Friendica Red is out there too, though it seems it hardly matters what is programmed; the problem remains the same - network effect; it'll be a bit of a lonely place unless your friends are all collectively super-techie or paranoid. It used to be pretty easy to link status.net to twitter, and talk to people on Gtalk from your other XMPP servers; but alas that "walled garden" thing marches on.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by omoc on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:55AM
here in Asia, everyone uses Wechat. Just try it and ask your friends to move over, it might be also interesting featurewise as it supports voice and videocalls
(Score: 2, Informative) by Zwerg_Sense on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:37AM
https://threema.ch/ [threema.ch]
could be an alternative:
- forward secrecy
- does not store contact lists on the server, apparently only cashes hashes of your contacts for a period.
Business model? unknown
Source code? unavailable
(Score: 1) by linsane on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:12PM
surely Facebook 'cashes' while Threema 'caches'
(Score: 3, Informative) by soylentsandor on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:24PM
A pretty elaborate review of a whole bunch of alternatives can be found here [missingm.co].
This sig intentionally left blank
(Score: 1) by zeigerpuppy on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:50PM
Jabber is the open protocol. It has a lot of good clients.
I run jabber on a Debian server and use BeeJive (iOS) as a client.
It is a nice light solution and doesn't hog too much battery when running.
This purchase by Facebook is about name and users, not tech.