WhatsApp confirms Google isn’t buying it
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
If an acquisition price is leaked before the deal is completed, the acquiree has no intention of selling.
In a private acquisition, there are only two parties in a position to leak: the acquirer and the acquiree. The acquirer, which has shareholders, competitors, and lots of money, has no incentive to leak the price on the table, or even the fact that there is a table. It gives away too much information to competitors and creates an unwanted news cycle. So in fact they'll be pissed if information about the negotiation is leaked.
If the acquiree actually wants to do a deal, they don't want to piss off the potential acquirer, so they'll keep their mouths shut. But they might have plenty of reasons to leak the negotation price, particularly if they're a company that is losing money and wants to inflate the company's valuation before another round of private financing. Going before investors saying "We turned down a billion dollars from Google, maybe you heard about it" creates a nice focal point for the ensuing discussion about the company's valuation.
Negotiating in bad faith like this happens all the time, most famously with Facebook/Yahoo! (2006) and Groupon/Google (2010). So the next time you read another news story about an acquisition rumor that includes a price tag, ignore it, because the story's not for you; it's for a future investor.
(Note that the foregoing logic does not apply if the acquiree is publicly traded, because the deal must be approved by shareholders, so the acquisition price is always "leaked" before the papers are signed.)
>At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion.
There is such thing - XMPP. Just create a reliable federated (and standard compliant!) service, and give people a decent client with audio/video XMPP/Jingle calling capabilities. Why their passion has to revolve around gutting security in the process of creating a non compliant walled IM abomination is really puzzling.
> Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
What about your identity being in the picture? Shouldn't they warn their users that they offer an insecure and identity leak / theft prone service?
There are several ways to address XMPP energy drain, some of which were proposed as XEPs. Google uses one of such methods (google queue). Facebook uses another.
You are right, a permanent connection isn't that great on mobile phones, but as a custom XMPP service you could just use push technology like every other app, too. That's what e.g. Google and Facebook are doing.
Beejive and IM+, two common mobile IM apps with XMPP support, are doing this, too. The only downside is, that since they don't want to store you credentials, you have to run the app to reconnect to your XMPP server and delegate that connection to their push servers. This is just a bit annoying when either jabber.org or their servers have connection errors.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-backslides-on-feder...
For instance, I would love to break free from Google Talk and essentially make my email and IM divorce each other. I don't want them to be together until I can take my IM connections, history, transcript to some other provider(as in exporting and without the need of adding all IM connections again - which is impossible as of now) like email files and start afresh with the same address.
Facebook chat is worse. MS is melting all of their service in one pan it seems and anyway apps like Skype should not be encouraged(performance!).
So, I would love an app that is on every mobile(I don't think there's anything else other than WhatsApp) and which comes to every desktop or can come.
Why is it impossible to divorce them, and what stops you from doing it? For example, you can use such method:
1. Create an account on any federated XMPP server (there are many, for example DuckDuckGo has one: https://duck.co/topic/duckduckgo-s-new-public-xmpp-jabber-se... ) or choose any to your liking.
Google Talk is federated, so you'll be able to communicate with its users being a user of other federated server (like the above).
2. Let your contacts know that you are switching XMPP server, and send them authorization request from the new XMPP ID.
3. When they accept, remove them from the old XMPP ID contacts.
Following this process will require you having both IDs logged in your client for a while, so you could communicate with all contacts, but when you'll transfer them all - you can delete the first account and continue with just the second one.
Automating it all could be nice (with something like this http://el-tramo.be/blog/sluift/ ), but manual method works too without much stress, unless your contact list is really huge, then automation seems like the most sensible way.
What I mean by moving connections was removing the need to add each individual IM/XMPP contact again. What I meant was that somehow the connection could move with my XMPP ID that is also an email address on my own domain. In a way that I don't have to add every single WhatsApp friend again. I just have to prove that it's the same mobile number.
It has it's drawbacks. When I activated my new prepaid number I used to get WhatApp pings from people I didn't know and I used to send pings to people who had got my friends' abandoned/deactivated numbers. I emailed WhatsApp and ofcourse never heard from them.
It never really made sense to me that Google would buy WhatsApp. What do they have that Google can't build themselves? An established userbase, sure, but any messaging app included by default in Android will have users migrating in droves.
Source:
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/21864047
"We do not store your chat history on our servers. Chat messages are considered private and are only stored until they are delivered."
I want to send a message to people and they read and respond whenever they want. I want people to message me and I read and respond whenever I want.
I don’t want to deal with ping, hey, you are online why are you not responding. This is why half my Gtalk contacts are always “away” even if they are at the keyboard: presence status has become useless, let’s just get rid of it.
Presence makes almost no sense when the program implementing it resides on a phone, where any time someone sends you a message--even if the application isn't running--you'll know (because your pants just buzzed), and could very well react to it if you felt like it. You're always "present"; you're just sometimes purposefully non-responsive.
...now, on the other hand, "openness to being interrupted" status could be pretty useful. :)
I think what you want should be a setting in my machine (whether phone or computer): silence all notifications when I don’t want to be interrupted (I use iOS “Do Not Disturb” all the time).
Your argument contradicts every acquisition\acquihires made by google so far
any messaging app included by default in Android will have users migrating in droves
Yeah, that's why Google+ replaced Facebook and everyone is using Google Talk. Nearly every browser comes with Google as search engine or homepage and it didn't worked.
[1] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...
Secondly, that it was created to exploit people's laziness - i.e. it skips registration step (one time thing) presenting it as a "convenience feature", but it does it at the cost of sacrificing security (i.e. it offers no way to choose user ID and password, instead of that it uses hardcoded information derived from the phone hardware ID), obviously not letting the user know about this downside. So it's a wicked trick which is used to attract unaware users.
I use Whatsapp once per month and I'm not even sure what it does or how it does it. I just know I can send group messages to everyone in my contact list who have it and it WORKS.
When you sign up for e-mail, do you think it's normal to skip the registration step and to give you some random ID and password? Why is IM any different? Also, do you think it's normal for your e-mail ID to be tied to one device, or you'd expect to be able to access and read / send it from multiple devices / computers? Why should IM be any different? That's what XMPP is about. Whatsapp tries to create a crippled service instead, but somehow manages to wrap it as a "convenience".