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Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

That is a LOT of money.

That being said, I use WhatsApp every day to chat with my friends around the world and it's really excellent. I know it's used a lot in other parts of the world even more, so I doubt this purchase is focused on US markets. It seems that every one of my Arab friends uses WhatsApp to talk to their families back home (and they use it at home, too). I don't know about other regions.

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WhassApp is the standard in Mexico. It replaced Windows Live (MSN) Messenger after they killed it by trying to make everybody switching to Skype and the interest of the people shifted to mobile.

AFAICT it's become the standard in italy too. People use it way more than facebook now, judging by my contacts (and I don't even use it, I just see a bunch of people doing it).

MSN had 350 million active users a few years ago. And they just pissed it into oblivion. MSN had Skype feature set before Skype, but did nothing to publicize it.

And also, think - MSN had everyone's friends info, as well as frequency of contact and so on. It would have been a perfect way to launch a real social network. MSN fumbled that too.

A comedy of errors.

Also standard here in Chile. FB Messenger is somewhat common as well, but WhatsApp has the largest following by far.

Viber and WhatsApp are about 50/50 here in the Philippines. Used mostly for international messaging.

here in Peru the same, it is the standard app to chat

It's popular in Malaysia too. WhatsApp seems to be the messaging equivalent of soccer.

Standard with all the cool people in Nigeria.

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