

Jan Koum promoting WhatsApp in the Flyertalk forum (2009) - takinola
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-thoughts-about-my-free-iphone-app-whatsapp.html

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w1ntermute
A post by him from after the deal was signed:
[http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/22387891-post72.html](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/22387891-post72.html)

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ajju
Jan Koum seems like a genuinely nice guy. I am glad he is tech's most visible
billionaire this boom cycle.

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oldyahoo
(Created a throwaway account just to post this)

When he was at Yahoo, he was considered a bit of dick by the way he parked his
shiny BMW M5; he would take two spots, and then argue with people who
complained. Parking at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus is a bit tight, so seeing him
park like that rubbed people the wrong way; and despite being called out on
it, his attitude was "so, what are you gonna do about it? I'll park as I see
fit".

Go to Flickr and look up "ycantpark" tag from those days.

Just offering another data point thats all.

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tlrobinson
Wow, is this common at other companies, or are Yahoo employees particularly
bad at parking?

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ambrood
Heh! I didn't work at the SNV campus, but in my time at Yahoo they had a daily
email threads about bad parking jobs. Y! Cant Park or something...

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bredren
Funny to see this.

Posting to subject area forums (particularly communities using the familiar
vBulletin) to gain your first 100 users, is a great way to get started. Posted
this suggestion to the first 100 users thread recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7250358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7250358)

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tyho
He has some IM profiles listed on his flyertalk profile:
[http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/jkb76.html](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/jkb76.html)
Hasn't gotten round to adding whatsapp yet!

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gojomo
Since having a WhatsApp contact is equivalent to sharing a mobile phone
number, that makes a certain amount of sense. It's intentionally more
intimate.

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rdl
Flyertalk is basically everything that was ever good about HN, Reddit,
Slashdot, without the negatives. I don't understand how it has remained so
awesome for so long.

~~~
saryant
FT has a huge and very strong mod team. Anything off-topic gets killed or
moved to Omni pretty fast. Some of the individual forums are more heavily
modded than others (United Airlines forum compared to Travelbuzz).

Flyertalkers also talk in code. "(23 Feb) UA 574 ord to ewr upgraded to 767 3
class" is a pretty typical thread title. The barrier to joining the
conversation is high. That's nothing to compared to this gem from the trick-it
thread (up to 31,000 posts):

> Were you guys aware that you can FD half by C1-C2 via northern star and then
> returning on the neutral longhorns that are the wholly owned sub of the
> airline named after me? Just discovered that today by accident. Pretty cool
> at times.

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jcdavis
The trick it folks intentionally talk in vague terms to avoid anything being
spread around. Most of the easy FD deals have been killed over the last few
years because of this. The time/value tradeoff for those is now above my
threshhold, but back in 2009 when they were much easier I flew SFO-SYD for
~$570.

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gberger
It's interesting to see that he promotes the app by mentioning the status
feature, which is rarely used nowadays (at least in my experience).

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SifJar
Back then, that's all it had. At the start, you could update your current
status and see all your contacts' statuses. When iOS added push notifications,
it got updated so you could get notifications of friends' status updates
without opening the app. It wasn't until version 2.0 (at least a couple of
months after the forum post linked here) that the messaging functionality was
added.

~~~
kelnos
Ah, I always thought "WhatsApp" was a weird name for a messaging app. Makes
sense that the first version was just a status-update-sharer, a "what's up?"
app. Nice.

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jjoe
Big things start small like a post in a forum.

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shimon_e
The best deal on FlyerTalk, by far!

