WhatsApp bucks convention, quietly builds a messaging titan | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp bucks convention, quietly builds a messaging titan

gigaom.com

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 Everything else just looks outdated and clunky in comparison.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.

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.

GTalk on Android just plain doesnt work for most on-the-go conversations. The latency is horendous and often I "go offline", and the client crashes. Might be due to my phone, but still, WhatsApp is optimized for wireless radios. The latency can be bad when WhatsApp is on Wifi too, but it generally works great when on (3)G.

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.

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

Agreed. It's refreshing to see a startup that is actually in business to sell a product, rather than aiming for acquisition and trying to be the product.

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).

It is also encoraging to see a subscription business that is reasonable priced at $1-2 for 3 years, way under what people tell you is the viable minimum.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I will never use Facebook as my primary IM tool. I have IM disabled in Facebook as the last thing I need is all my 'friends' accessing my time and online presence.

Its biggest plus is that it is cross platform. They have apps for Blackberry, Android, iOS and Symbian. So you can talk with almost anybody out there. At least in my home country, most people have Blackberry/Symbian. Imagine having a group conversation with people on different platforms and in different countries.

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.

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.

http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2011/09/one-million/

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

Maybe they count each US state as a country?

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.

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?

The main draw is that it's multi-platform. Added bonuses include very limited setup and no worries about needing to start the app once it's installed.

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.

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.

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.

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