$19 billion!

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

Femme Folle wrote: And next week or next month, there will be a new thing that people are using.

I think there's more to it than that.

Zuckerberg is probably of the opinion that once Facebook has built sufficient critical mass, then they won't go the way of MySpace. And the value of any network is in its users (and WhatsApp does have a lot of users, at least in Europe).

I think he's also terrified of people migrating to other platforms, such as Instagram and WhatsApp and prefers to have them in the Facebook tent, even if they're cannibalising Facebook services.

[Bored Of Education]

$19 billion!

I was assuming that this was aimed at older users as the boy has nothing to do with this using, instead, a mixture of FB messenger, FaceTime and the ludicrously unwieldy, user-unfriendly yet popular Snapchat. I would ask him about WhatsApp but don't want to encourage more.

[Wouter D]

$19 billion!

WhatsApp strives to take away another source of income from the mobile network providers.

I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't know this a little while earlier than the rest of the world.

[Ek weet nie]

$19 billion!

Viber already does voice and messages.

WhatsApp is probably the most useful app on my phone. It's the easiest way of casually organising a night out or exchanging pictures. I've never had to pay a cent. I'm not sure how valuable the metadata from a user would be. I've never noticed any advertising on it but I wouldn't be a very heavy user.

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

Ek weet nie wrote: Viber already does voice and messages.

WhatsApp is probably the most useful app on my phone. It's the easiest way of casually organising a night out or exchanging pictures. I've never had to pay a cent. I'm not sure how valuable the metadata from a user would be. I've never noticed any advertising on it but I wouldn't be a very heavy user.

There's a charge after the first year, for the following year, but it's only 99¢ I think. There are no adverts on it.

[Ek weet nie]

$19 billion!

I've been using it since before June 2012 and haven't paid anything. May be country or usage dependent.

[Toby Gymshorts]

$19 billion!

I've just checked, and my year's licence expires in April. I might renew it for 3 years this time (for the princely sum or around £2) as the price is bound to increase once Zuckerberg takes hold of it.

[Hofzinser]

$19 billion!

I use WhatsApp. It's really good for having, essentially, text message conversations between multiple people (I have a group set up with my brothers so we can exchange messages that we all see simultaneously, for instance).

It's also great for multimedia content - you can send and receive pictures and videos instantaneously. I can, for example, record my daughter being cute (as is her wont) and my family on the other side of the country can get a video of it on their phone seconds later.

I dare say there are many other ways to do all this, but WhatsApp has certainly done it all very well for me.

I had it on my Android for about a year and then got a message saying I would need to pay to keep using it. The fee quoted was something like 79c for a year, but the payment methods weren't convenient at the time I got the message so I left it a few days. I was then granted an extension of another month free of charge, which will shortly expire. Mrs Hofzinser, on the other hand, has had it on her iPhone for much longer than I have and has never been asked for payment. I don't know if it's an Android/iPhone thing or what.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

$19 billion!

So facebook have paid £11bn for an app that allows you to send each other pictures of you eating food or your cat playing the piano. Good job no-one already uses facebook for that.

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote: So facebook have paid £11bn for an app that allows you to send each other pictures of you eating food or your cat playing the piano. Good job no-one already uses facebook for that.

Well Facebook had an almost-identical application — Facebook Messenger. Except that no one was really using it.

[Ek weet nie]

$19 billion!

It's used differently to facebook. It's easier to select a subset of your contacts to send the messages and images. Those groups stay on it in easy to access form thereafter. It's more informal - you only open the app when sending or receiving a message, there is no browsing of statuses or looking at random updates of your wider circle of friends.

What I don't get it is the revenue generator. Nobody types long messages or "likes" products on it so I'm not sure key word metadata is of interest. Most people using whatsapp will also use Facebook mobile and Facebook will have access to the geo-data. It's unlikely that you'll pay a huge amount for it as then you might as well just go back to using the phone provider or a variant of the app will come to the market and undercut it.

Maybe it's to isolate who the social influencers are to target them to be brand ambassadors?

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

I was referring to Facebook Messenger, which is a standalone app.

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

The difference between them is that WhatsApp takes numbers from your contacts list, while Facebook Messenger is based on your Facebook friends.

[Ek weet nie]

$19 billion!

Stumpy Pepys wrote: I was referring to Facebook Messenger, which is a standalone app.

Yeah, crosspost - I was responding to Rogin, not yourself.

[Alderman Barnes]

$19 billion!

I think the thing with Whats App isn't that it's free, but that it's a massive improvement on the system it's replacing. It's easy enough for old duffers like me to use, sending pictures and films and whatnot, which I wouldn't have been able to do before.

I tried Facebook for a while but it's too intrusive and unwieldy, and I logged into Twitter to try it out but still haven't got the foggiest idea what to do with it.

Viber's an example of the opposite. The missus made me install it because it's free, but the quality is bloody awful, and using a mobile phone is as cheap as chips anyway these days so there's no real benefit to it.

[Lucia Lanigan]

$19 billion!

The advertising on Facebook looks like such a blunt instrument that I'd be interested to know how it makes revenue. I think I told Facebook I was born in 1912, which may account for the various retirement plan/incontinence ads I got until recently. But now most of it seems to be hetero dating ads (in which 25-year-old women with the kinds of features that jump out of a postage stamp-sized pic at their target market, i.e. prominent boobs, play both "mature" and "18+" women in my area) or dysmorphic bodybuilding ads in which male pensioners' and twelve-year-old boys' heads are superimposed on the same six-packed, photoshopped bodies. It looks worse than any dystopia 90s digitally aware people would have imagined, though of course I just installed adblock and don't have to see it anymore. Except for when my (gay, male) boss gets volubly annoyed at having exactly the same imagery thrown up in the borders of his feed.

I suppose they're spread-betting on the fact that everyone has a body of some description.

[alyxandr]

$19 billion!

Lucia Lanigan wrote: I suppose they're spread-betting on the fact that everyone has a body of some description.

ha ha sux2BU meatbag

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

$19 billion!

Some others on here will know better whether or not I'm being hopelessly naïve here, but I do wonder whether Facebook may have made a permanently brand-damaging and expensive mistake by allowing the flood of advertising (at least on middle-aged men's FB screenviews) from semi-pornographic hyper-trashy "dating sites" (which are either super-tacky low rent genuine dating sites or perhaps some front for the sex industry, or something in-between).

Isn't there a risk that that has so debased the medium of FB advertising that it will put off some large respectable companies with large advertising budgets of which FB might be seeing a chunk if they didn't stream the garbage?

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: Some others on here will know better whether or not I'm being hopelessly naïve here, but I do wonder whether Facebook may have made a permanently brand-damaging and expensive mistake by allowing the flood of advertising (at least on middle-aged men's FB screenviews) from semi-pornographic hyper-trashy "dating sites" (which are either super-tacky low rent genuine dating sites or perhaps some front for the sex industry, or something in-between).

I think it's more complicated than that. Now, people complain that harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers is a bad thing. But it raises the question, if you must have ads (and, if you're not prepared to pay a subscription, then you probably must), then wouldn't you rather see ads that are relevant to you than irrelevant ones?

I suspect you're like me in that you try to give as little information to the site as possible, especially in that I never hit the Like button. Now I imagine Facebook can offer very granular information to advertisers, but if I'm not giving them much, I'm just going to get served with very generic ads.

Amazon, on the other hand, which has my entire browsing and purchasing history, has an occasionally spooky talent for showing me desirable things.

I did get a FB advert recently to 'date ugly women', which amused me.

[beak]

$19 billion!

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: Some others on here will know better whether or not I'm being hopelessly naïve here, but I do wonder whether Facebook may have made a permanently brand-damaging and expensive mistake by allowing the flood of advertising (at least on middle-aged men's FB screenviews) from semi-pornographic hyper-trashy "dating sites" (which are either super-tacky low rent genuine dating sites or perhaps some front for the sex industry, or something in-between).

Have Facebook got a different algorithm at work, or have you just done a Gavin Barwell?

[Bored Of Education]

$19 billion!

Stumpy Pepys wrote:

So facebook have paid £11bn for an app that allows you to send each other pictures of you eating food or your cat playing the piano. Good job no-one already uses facebook for that.

Well Facebook had an almost-identical application — Facebook Messenger. Except that no one was really using it.

Really, bloody hell, I use it all the time as does the boy and the wife. It's not just us talking to each other to save shouting up the stairs either, there are other people that use it. The boy has found a way of actually talking to people on it, I know not how.

[Stumpy Pepys]

$19 billion!

Bored of Education wrote: Really, bloody hell, I use it all the time as does the boy and the wife. It's not just us talking to each other to save shouting up the stairs either, there are other people that use it. The boy has found a way of actually talking to people on it, I know not how.

So we can statistically extrapolate you and your family to represent the population of the Earth?

[ad hoc]

$19 billion!

I hate facebook messenger. I don;t know how to turn thr fucking thing off on my phone either, so I get this constant "Bing" noise bothering me on a regular basis.

[Auntie Beryl]

$19 billion!

I've never used Facebook Messenger.

I use WhatsApp to talk to my friends all the time, in varying combinations of subgroups. That way I can message multiple people at once without all my FB contacts (or shared Twitter followers) reading it.

As far as I'm concerned it's a far better way of communicating with a subsection of my actual friends - as opposed to the hinterland of humanity created when trying to have as many FB and Twitter contacts as possible was seen as desirable.

Of course, I could just go through FB and prune people, but that feels a little rude.

Anyway, my little WhatsApp coterie are now researching alternatives...

[Ginger Yellow]

$19 billion!

ha ha sux2BU meatbag

I do like the IRL alternative "meatspace".