What an App! - WhatsApp sale to Facebook

By Hemantha Abeywardena in London

The sale of WhatsApp, the cross-platform mobile messaging app, to Facebook for staggering $19 billion took the entire technological realm by surprise on Thursday.

"I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook," said Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook on his own page, while revealing the closely-guarded secret.

The investors did not share Zukerberg's enthusiasm, though; the shares of Facebook fell by almost one percent after the announcement was made, perhaps, owing to the sum agreed upon.Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the two former Yahoo employees, created the mobile messaging service in 2009, having faced numerous setbacks en route to the pinnacle of success.

Brian Acton, for instance, had been turned down by Twitter and Facebook when he made an attempt to join either of the companies. Jan Koum, meanwhile, is a Ukrainian immigrant, who had struggled to survive in the US, having entered the land of the free as a 16-year-old student.

With over 450 million active users in a month and the steady attraction of over one million new users a day, WhatsApp has already become a global phenomenon in instant messaging. With not much luck in its own messaging service, Facebook made the move, before a rival sets its sight upon it, perhaps, while realising how significant the short messaging services still are.

The two co-founders realised in 2009 the rapid technological progress made in WiFi networks, in terms of speed and availability, and hit upon the idea to make use of them while creating the messaging service that relies on WiFi data exchange.

They saw the potential opportunity, when millions of mobile phone users were at the mercy of mobile network owners, when it came to sending or receiving instant messages; it was particularly expensive when the need arose for international messaging.

The meteoric rise of WhatsApp, in popularity and use, made the text messaging via mobile networks almost irrelevant.

Since mobile network operators were very slow to recognise the threat posed by a service of this kind -- and adapt to it as well - they have been forced to give up on making immense profit by instant messaging.

The popularity of an insanely-basic, instant messaging service clearly shows that users have not completely turned their back on simple means, when it comes to communication, a fact that the existing major players did not take seriously at their own peril.

Microsoft, for instance, had a very effective instant messaging service, MSN Messenger, with millions of users worldwide before social networking phenomenon caught on. Unfortunately, since the ambition of Microsoft was

solely driven by the desire to make profit, they overlooked the evolving needs of the users, especially the young, in an ever expanding technological landscape.

Superficial measures

Adding insult to the injury, Microsoft underestimated the growth of social networks in proportion to the expansion of the internet globally, perhaps, in the flawed assumption that email services would still continue to grow as a strong means of communication.

Rebranding the products as Windows Live Mail or Windows Live Messenger, as a last resort, is tantamount to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Moreover, it confused the average user, when he or she needed clarity and intuitive approach. The disproportionate focus on cosmetic, superficial measures to impress the users backfired; users left the services in droves.

Yahoo Messenger experienced the same fate -- and in almost similar circumstances.

The effect of the amalgamation of WhatsApp team with those of Facebook remains to be seen.

The co-founders of WhatsApp have been on record for their disapproval of advertisements in their services: "Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.

At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen," they said in their collective blog in 2012 about the advertising.

All WhatsApp users are eager to see whether Mark Zukerberg has got something up his sleeve to make the combination of WhatsApp and Facebook a force to reckon with in the arena of social networking - in the years to come with fresh revolutionary changes without compromising on the privacy of users.

- Asian Tribune