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ritholtz.com

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Something that resonates in the article for me is that I don't understand the utility of Facebook's big acquisitions. You see Google and Apple make acquisitions for talent and technology to build out products they want to launch and/or improve that ultimately drive their core business.

What does WhatsApp provide Facebook? People are talking about the value of the user base. How is the user base more valuable to Facebook than it would be to Wal-Mart? Is Facebook going to merge WhatsApp accounts into FB accounts and the WhatsApp platform into Facebook Messenger? Ditto for Instagram. I'm not sure what advantage that provided to Facebook. As far as I can tell it's an entirely separate products and platform and user base.

If anyone has insight on this, please enlighten me!

Personally, I'm not sure that it does provide Facebook anything - same for Instagram.

That said, there is an argument I think could be made as follows: Facebook (and Google) is essentially about data. The more information they have on a given person, the more information they have period, the more valuable they are. This value is to advertisers and marketers of course (the real "customers") but also to end users. WhatsApp is $19 billion worth of data about people in places where Facebook doesn't have a lot of data. Countries like India, for example. I don't think Facebook penetration is nearly as significant there as it is in the US (though I do not have a statistic on hand for that ATM).

So the argument is that WhatsApp gives Facebook a foot in the door to more information on more places at once. Just like Google gets data on what people want from their videos from YouTube, Instagram gives Facebook more information on what people do with their images and how they share them. Facebook already does these things - messaging and image sharing - but it could be argued that Facebook will be able to do them better/more profitably/at least in a more aware way if it studies how it works for Instagram and WhatsApp.

Again, I don't really see the point myself - but that's an argument that could be made.

One argument is that for Facebook it's better that they own the big competitors rather than someone else (Google rolling it in to Google+, Apple doing something with it, etc).

As long as they keep swallowing up any "social(-ish) network" app before they become a real threat to Facebook, Facebook can still be the king.

Here's pretty realistic article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/02/20/5-key-rea...

I don't have an opinion on that topic, but probably just data mining on the set of WhatsApp users can be pretty useful.

What is more interesting for me is why WhatsApp is so popular? It's not unique, is it? Why is it so special?

I haven't used WhatsApp, but from what I can tell it runs on a lot of platforms, including feature phones. An iPhone app is of no use to someone who can't afford one.

Perhaps there are more affordable cheap Chinese Android phones these days, but WhatsApp started in 2009

It's also a network effect where people use it because their friends use it. I have the same questions about Craigslist. There were certainly a lot of free competitors at the time, but somehow they managed to attract users.

Oh, feature phones… Yeah, that must be it. I was thinking about smartphone apps. Skype has been around for years even before smartphones became popular. Last smartphone I had was way before Android was born, so I can't exactly name rivals of WhatsApp, but I'm sure I heard about many of them even before I heard about WhatsApp. There're many messengers (even completely free ones), there're bridges between them, there's Viber. But, yes, availability on feature phones explains a lot.

I enjoy articles like these because I have a certain inborn hatred of social media and social networks, and I get schadenfreude from seeing them fail.

That said, I'd like to believe it - that Facebook and Twitter are happenstance lucky breaks, and not worth all that - but things are worth what we say they're worth, and you could have made the same arguments about Gates and Jobs twenty years ago.

I'll wait to proclaim Facebook's imminent demise until there's actually some "next big thing" out there.

I don't know the actual reasons, but people are looking at the question from the perspective of "what does Facebook get out of this" when the opposite might actually be true. They may have seen that someone else could buy up WhatsApp and pose a real threat to Facebook's market share. So it might be entirely possible that this was a defensive buy. If spending $16 billion now meant that you didn't have to spend $50 billion later on it would make sense.

One does not simply spend $16 billion without giving it a good deal of forethought why.

This article is terrible.

> Amazon has stayed ahead by creating the Kindle, in-house.

Is he suggesting that the only way to be innovative is through hardware? Facebook has gone through many changes over the years, adding the wall, adding photo sharing, and a host of other things. To say

> Facebook innovation is centered on changing privacy and advertising policies

is just plain wrong. Also

> One can even argue he stole his original idea from the Winklevosses.

sounds like he watched The social network to many times.

"Not Innovative" is a rather weak criticism to lay on someone. I'd be impressed if he actually produced some examples of "creativity" of his own as to what should be done by FB. But the moment a tech writer opines on the specifics, rather than generalities (as many often stick to), they're going to run into a wall of hurt with comments calling them out for being idiots themselves :P.

This article is nothing but a sensationalist headline that makes little sense and has even less substance. The following quote sums this up:

>Recent studies show that few post and no one clicks through on likes, what’s a poor boy to do?

This was written by Bob Lefsetz, who is a music business blogger.

Yep. His main blog is here:

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

He seems more into politics than anything else these days.

That's the best kind of bankrupt.

He is a business man.

Flagged. This is almost a hit piece.

One can even argue he stole his original idea from the Winklevosses.

I can believe that someone would say something that stupid, but not under his real name.

We're done here.

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