
WhatsApp bucks convention, quietly builds a messaging titan - jasonmcalacanis
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/11/whatsapp-bucks-convention-quietly-builds-a-messaging-titan/
======
ansy
A lot of people in this thread seem to be trying to pick apart Whatsapp's
business model, but I can't seem to find anything to criticize.

1) Creating a new identity and communicating it to people is a chore. Whatsapp
just uses your existing email and phone number.

2) Creating a new list of contacts is a chore. Whatsapp just uses your
existing contact list of emails and phone numbers.

3) At least on iOS, signing in to a service and managing session timeouts is
passé. With Whatsapp you install it, run it once, and the Push Notification
API handles the persistent connection and receiving messages without ever
having to launch the app again. Or without even making sure it's running.

4) iMessage and BBM do the same thing, but those are nonstarters in a multi
platform world. Neither service is going to go multi platform any time soon if
ever.

Whatsapp is the Dropbox of messaging. Everything else just looks outdated and
clunky in comparison.

That said, I'm really disappointed in Google. Google is positioning GTalk as a
competitive advantage for Android. There is no reason there shouldn't be
official GTalk clients on every platform. GTalk on iOS would be more popular
than all of Google's other iOS apps combined.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Good analysis, I think you're right. Not having to sign into a service is a
great way to get people to at least try it out; I've noticed some others
start-ups doing this (Staticloud comes to mind) and I hope it's a trend that
continues.

Google needs to consolidate it's messaging offering. Right now it has Google
Talk, Google Voice, Google+ Huddles, and up until a few months ago, Disco.

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huhtenberg
Good for them. 17 engineers, 3 support reps and 2 founders, organic viral
growth based strictly on product merits - my kind of startup.

However.

Now taking bets which established IM company will sue them first and over
which (trivial) patent. Perhaps after refusing their acquisition offer.

~~~
unalone
I'm concerned less about lawsuits and more about in-grown group messaging
technology. iOS 5 just brought about half my friends/my entire family over to
iMessages, which duplicate IM features like seeing the other person typing.
It's so nifty that it makes me wish I had an iMessage interface on my
computer, or an integration at least with iChat. And it makes me a much less
likely user of mobile IM applications, because now I have a built-in
equivalent that works without my searching out (or paying for) an application.

Which is too bad, because I wish we had more start-ups this honest. Make
something somebody wants, charge them at a rate they're willing to pay. I'm
increasingly sick of advertising models, and of start-ups that start with
funding and then move towards a profit model (which is usually advertising).

~~~
coob
WhatsApp still has one thing going for it that 'in-grown' tech does not -
interoperability. BBM and iMessages only work on those platforms, WhatsApp
transcends them.

~~~
der_ketzer
The thing I don't like about WhatsApp vs BBM/iMessages is that I must share my
phone number (at least I don't know another way) to chat. I think sharing a
phone number is more personal than a pin like in BB.

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savrajsingh
As a data point, I went on a tour of the AT&T Global network operations center
(in NJ) in mid October, and they showed us some stats -- one I recall is 2.3B
texts on the AT&T network in the past 24 hours. So WhatsApp is closing in on
half of AT&T's SMS volume.

<https://twitter.com/#!/savraj/status/126718943179190272>

~~~
nivertech
I guess AT&T texts are mostly one-to-one, while WhatsApp's has much larger
proportion of one-to-many.

If one sending 1000 messages per day to a group of 1M - you get 1B (+1000)
messages per day.

~~~
bvdbijl
What is also very different is the way WhatsApp is used, as you break up
messages in multiple bits sometimes, which doesn't matter because it's free
anyway

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sssparkkk
I'm getting really tired of all these proprietary instant messaging solutions.
It won't be long before people will realize they will at some point have to
pay for usage of WhatsApp. When that happens, something else will gain
traction, restarting the cycle again once more.

I hope Google just acquires WhatsApp already and opens up the platform. It's
been years now, and about bloody time for something to appear that's the
standard, open, cross-platform and free way of sending messages over the
internet.

~~~
Bootvis
There is Jabber which GTalk uses. Unfortunately it doesn't really get
traction.

~~~
marquis
Jabber is now XMPP which is a hugely used platform all over the internet for
many many purposes including web and in-app messaging. It is fully
interoperable between domains (if the server allows it).

~~~
sssparkkk
It's actually also used by WhatsApp, only not in a way that suggests they will
ever open up their service for federation (and why would they?).

So yeah, XMPP is part of the solution, but not if it's used in a closed off
proprietary way.

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ovi256
This is the perfect example for "picking pennies in front of a charging
steamroller". IM is already chosen as infrastructure by platform makers
(Apple, Facebook), given that they've integrated in into their offerings. This
is the kind of startup that withers after the next platform update.

Do they have some secret sauce that enables them to offer way more value than
a vanilla IM app ? That's their only escape route.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Facebook is the only platform company that can really "win" this. If they made
messaging a bigger priority in their mobile apps they could very well own the
market. At the moment Facebook apps are made to reflect the Facebook website
with the newsfeed being the center of everything. This is a shame, but
fixable. IMessage is a supplement for SMS, not a replacement.

~~~
tobias3
Well, there is Facebook Messenger? It's pretty much the same as WhatsApp...

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I wasn't aware of this app, looks like it's available for iOS, Android, and
Blackberry. That indeed does sound like a winner.

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sgt
WhatsApp gives me a warm fuzzy feeling every time I use it, knowing that my
messages are whizzing through an Erlang application running on FreeBSD.

~~~
kinkora
Question: how do you know Whatsapp infrastructure intimately and if you do,
can you elaborate on it more?

I am thoroughly interested in their backend. I've always wondered why the app
is quite efficient across all platforms and have fantastic uptimes given their
global scale/reach.

~~~
Zash
They didn't write it, but based on that they were hiring XMPP devs before,
it's likely that they are running ejabberd.

~~~
kinkora
Ahhh.. I've came across XMPP before but not ejabberd. Many thanks mate! I am
working on a similar project which is why I'm fairly intrested.

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buster
What i really hate is that everyone tries to convince me to use that app. Why?
What benefits does it have? Only the drawback that i have to transmit every
phone number in my address book to them. I don't want them to have my phone
number and yet half a dozen people i know transferred it to them without my
knowledge.

In short: There is XMPP, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, etc. Why the hell
another one? And one that will cost.. i really don't get it..

Next best thing to happen will be that some big advertising company (see
myspace) will buy them.. hooray...

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pajju
It's no different compared to other IM's. There are other players like Nimbuzz
in this space from a long time and also for all platforms.

The only cool thing they did was getting your phone numbers and mapping those
contacts to your address book.

This opens a whole new dimension.

IM is the next SMS 2.0. IM will be tightly integrated to our address books and
the platform makers will all enter this space and Kill the others. Like the
iMessage in iOS?

Today Platform is the king; content isn't.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
All platforms can do here is make the experience easy when you stay on their
platform. That is what IMessage does, make it transparent. Similar to how some
carriers have "unlimited mobile-to-mobile" within their network.

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temphn
> And it’s used in 250 countries on 750 networks.

There aren't 250 countries in the world. Must be a typo?

~~~
nivertech
Maybe they count each US state as a country?

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iaskwhy
While I prefer kik over WhatsApp because it's cleaner and free, I kinda like
WhatsApp being paid and still growing much more than the free alternatives.
This might be related to the ban kik had on Blackberry phones.

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cmelbye
Is it bad that I've never heard of this app or seen it been used in the wild
before? The iPhone app looks really ugly, and I can't see myself convincing my
friends to start using it if they have to pay for the app when we could just
be using iMessage, SMS, or Facebook Messenger. What's the draw here?

~~~
rodh257
iMessage is iOS only, SMS costs (unless its included in your plan) and
requires phone reception (as opposed to just wifi), I find facebook messenger
ends up with too many people on the web interface just saying hello to me as
if I'm at my PC wanting to smalltalk.

The draw is its free per message, cross platform, internet based and is a
direct replacement for sms/mms as opposed to being an existing chat program
pushed onto mobile.

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falling
To those suggesting that messaging should be replaced by instant messengers:
No thanks. WhatsApp, iMessage and this kind of solutions have one feature that
they carry over from SMS that makes all the difference to me: they don't have
the concept of presence.

I don't need to be "online" to receive messages, people don't know if I'm
"online", "away", "offline", they just send me a message and they know I'll
eventually get it. Exactly like email.

That is one great feature. How many times have you found yourself or your
buddies "hacking" the status indicator because you don't want to give away
your real status? I hate when people are always "away" or "busy":it makes the
status indicator useless and I just came to ignore it, it is just that
annoying thing that when it's gray it prevents me from messaging you.

If we just remove the status indicator, all that stress disappears. I don't
want IM to replace SMS-like solutions.

~~~
wladimir
Yes, the absence of a status indicator is a feature I really like as well. It
takes time and attention to keep it up-to-date, which I simply don't bother
with, so I am one of those people that is eternally 'busy' on other IMs.

