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posted by
LaminatorX
on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:00AM
from the It's-like-a-telegram-but-on-a-phone dept.
from the It's-like-a-telegram-but-on-a-phone dept.
siliconwafer writes:
"Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp has generated a lot of noise in the financial and tech industries, with some calling the purchase price 'down-right silly' and 'jaw-dropping', and others have said the price is fair, but question the strategy. Is the purchase price evidence that we're entering entering another tech bubble reminiscent of the 1990s? Some say no, while others believe that a bubble may exist only in social media, given that the Global X Social Media Index ETF has outperformed the NASDAQ over the past year."
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Have we entered another tech bubble?
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-- Fry
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Beukenbosje on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:31AM
As far as bubbles go, at this rate WhatsApp will be a even more expensive buy. I doubt investors will appreciate a toy tossed in a corner when that toy costed over 10% of the company. Undoubtedly FB will integrate WA with FB Messenger someday, but without chat-history ( http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/21864047 [whatsapp.com] ) (if it's true) they can only have meta-data to analyze.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday February 22 2014, @07:08AM
What's wrong with you people? You're using a proprietary communication system from a single-source with no interoperability via standard protocols, and then when you decide that the single-source is doing something that you don't like, you switch to a proprietary communication system from a single-source with no interoperability via standard protocols and a vague promise to open up server code (but with no server-to-server protocol and no promise that they will ever federate their servers).
XMPP is over a decade old at this point. There are multiple clients for every conceivable platform. You can host your own server or use someone else's, and users can communicate trivially between servers because the protocol was designed for federation from the start. You remind me of someone being screwed over by CompuServe and switching to a BBS.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2014, @01:22PM
I was going to mod for insightful plus your sig, but saw you are already at 5! Gj, thanks for the info.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lx on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:04PM
XMPP is over a decade old at this point. There are multiple clients for every conceivable platform.
And nobody outside a small circle of techies uses it. Whatsapp is cheap ubiquitous and offers the same privacy as the SMS service it replaces (i.e. very little from snooping by governments or select corporations) perfect for mundane communications. So unless you're in international trade talks or are plotting to overturn a police state there is nothing wrong with using it.
It's a good thing to be cynical about and suspicious of the motivations of entities like Facebook but it is madness to lock yourself in a bubble because of abstract fears and hypotheticals.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:18PM
Most non-techy email users use some webmail thing (actually, that's less true than it was with mobile phones and tablets being common for email), but that doesn't mean that email is not suitable for a non-technical audience.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by Beukenbosje on Saturday February 22 2014, @05:43PM
Nah.. I built my own BBS in MSX Basic before I got onto Compuserve.
The single-party configuration that works directly out of the box is the reason why apps like WA and Telegram attract a user base and XMPP-apps are very uncommon on the average smartphone. The fact that they scan the address book is a benefit. Would the web have evolved if we had to enter all Web 2.0 addresses ourselves on every site? Nope, pre-configured has big advantages. As the other comment mentions; you're not worse off with Telegram over Whatsapp. If they follow up on the promises, the open source clients are all we need for end-to-end encryption.
(Score: 1) by scourge on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:09PM
You sound smart so I'm actually leaving this [about.psyc.eu] here in the hopes that the word will get out. I too had hopes about xmpp but I'm fully behind psyc + gnunet now. And a couple projects I'm working on actually really need it.