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posted by
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: 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.
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(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.
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(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.)
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(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.
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(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.
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(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
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Litron286 on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:06AM
Gf likes to use it, personally I don't care