And in Brazil, from what my wife tells me. She uses it to talk to several of her relatives there. Why it’s the app of choice over other similar ones, I don’t know.
Nothing personal, but you sound like the past talking. Facebook is chasing the future (or at least the near future). Facebook is turning into a platform where grandparents share pictures of their grandkids. The younger kids are moving on, Facebook is just trying to keep in front of the wave.
As for WhatsApp, we got into it with kids and family living overseas. It really does serve as a “killer app” to use data instead of racking up stupid international phone and text charges.
Having never heard of WhatsApp until the buyout news yesterday, I’ve gotten not one but TWO pieces of spam using it as a vehicle. (“You have a WhatsApp message waiting… click here!”)
So it’s good for that.
Has anyone ever done a tally of the likely value or loss from these huge tech buyouts?
Slate explained it quite well. The takeaway paragraph:
Thus, it’s a move to get into a market that threatens theirs.
I think this is a big part of it. I’ve been hearing lately how teenagers are leaving Facebook in droves for more single purpose social apps like SnapChat and whatever else the kids are into these days. I think Facebook is making a point to buy up any of these apps that look like they might be successful. Facebook is basically trying to buy back its own lost users, in my opinion, while diversifying their own social offerings. Not a bad move if they’ve got the money, but I guess we’ll see if this “social networking” stuff is just a fad.
Anecdotally, I teach high school and for the Freshmen, especially, Facebook doesn’t even exist.
I realize Whatsapp isn’t big in the US, but it’s the messaging app I use the most (still not a lot). It’s a lot bigger than you think. Maybe like Lenovo? Who heard of Lenovo before they bought the Thinkpad?
I hate some parts of Whatsapp’s design, like how you can’t sign out. That’s right, the only way to remove your account from a device is to uninstall.
And no one, absolutely no one predicted this shift. Certainly not the brains behind Geocities and MySpace.
So, what are the kids using today? (And I’ve never had a Facebook account, so I’m so far behind the curve that I’m ahead of it.)
SnapChat is one I keep hearing about. I’m 31 so I have no clue really. What I’ve heard is big, do-everything networks like Facebook are falling out of favor and the kids are using a handful of single purpose apps. A messaging app, a photo sharing app, a location “checking in” app, et cetera. I have a feeling Facebook will be buying more of these in the near future. I gleaned all this mostly from Hacker News and NPR.
Too bad. An “Ate My Balls” webring on WordPress just doesn’t have the same cachet.
Facebook’s killer flaw is that it wasn’t designed for mobile devices. The new options were.
O joy.
I guess no matter how altruistic their original intent was, $16,000,000,000 would have a way of changing their mind.
I use WhatsApp sort of like a forum or mailing list for a small gaming group. Send a message to the group, the whole group sees it. We also have a Facebook group, but it’s not used nearly as much.
They left in large numbers before Facebook went public.
My teenage kids and most of their friends moved onto other things, my kids that are in their 20’s still use Facebook to some degree.
I have honestly lost track of the tech vunderfirms that were established to freely make the world a better place, and became grasping, closed-architecture, IPO-driven bastards.
It seems to be 1:1 correspondent with the principals leaving the cradle of the university and finding out the sidewalks (with all those, you know, people) are a bitch of a place to live.
When I saw this I had a similar (though with less laughing) reaction to the massively, absurdly overpriced purchase of AOL by Time-Warner some years back.
$16 billion, plus $3 billion more in “restricted stock units”.
From what I see, they’re starting to get bored with Snapchat. And at least from what I hear/see at my daughter’s high school, the kids are back to texting and sending random pictures from the internet to each other. They have whole conversations of nothing but pictures. Weird.
Whatsapp is a completely different form of digital media than FB. Facebook is not archaic, nor is it obsolete. It’s true that FB is chasing the future but that doesn’t mean that their original bread and butter is teetering on the edge of collapse.
I think it’s a myth that teens are “leaving” facebook but rather FB simply just isn’t an appropriate service for teens. Teens are terrified of their parents making things uncool, and want to be left alone. However, once you become an adult, you long for nostalgia. There is no nostalgia for a 14 year old. You don’t wonder how your best friend is doing because you have 5 classes a day with him. You don’t want to put up vacation pictures because nobody wants to see your family all wearing Goofy Hats in front of the Epcot Dome. Smash cut to when you’re 24 and you want to upload pictures of your trip to Costa Rica. Or you want to get addresses for your save-the-dates. Or you just want to share an an interesting editorial with nobody in particular?
Facebook is a photo album, rolodex, bulletin board type service and as such requires some degree of permanence. Kids have no need for that so they text and snapchat all the livelong day. Once they have something quasi-important, they’ll be back on FB. I think you can actually pinpoint it in that kids are making facebook, deactivating it, and then going back to it once College hits because they want to a) stay in touch with their old friends and b) make new friends.
WhatsApp OTOH is an entirely different social dynamic. It cashes in on the mobile-based texting aspect except it takes it out of SMS and into Data, which makes it cheaper and international. Couple that with a massive user base, a growing user base, it being a market FB is lagging in, and established monetization with their $1/year subscription fee, it makes it an interesting purchase.
I categorically refuse to use it until they add an apostrophe.