WhatsApp is down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That is roughly $30M per person.
How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..."
It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will never be the same.
UPDATE: Telegram is already facing connection issues in Europe caused by the "avalanche" of new users. https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360
... every 18 months a new messaging platform will be the go-to place.
Certainly in the UK, and most of europe, receiving SMS is free. Sending them might be 10-12p per message, but in practice contracts allow "unlimited SMS(sending)".
That's one of the reasons why I'd be hard pressed to use an application on a phone for sending messages - I already have that with SMS, and I don't need to know usernames, etc, I just use the contact number I already have stored.
For that matter, you could you efficiently pay users in the United States a dollar month?
To try to answer my own question, how about:
- give $1 lottery tickets (in a lottery that is well-known and recognized for each country in which you operate)
- give $1 credit that allows the user to buy any iPhone or Android app he wants (Is there a way to actually do that?)
This is a user acquisition tactic like any other - it doesn't get around the network effect that WhatsApp and others capitalize on to stay in the lead.
I've seen over 5 IM platforms rise and die (ICQ, AOL, MSM, etc), in the last 15 years, so this "network effect" is not that great a barrier...
[Most of these apps have already done this, by luring users away from SMS]
The best estimate from multiple methodologies is n log(n).
It validates your point in that the value of a network depends both on how many people are in a network, and the value that each gets from it.
But it supports what I said. A variety of ways of estimating the second factor in real networks finds that it tends to scale proportionately to log(n), hence giving a total value of O(n log(n)) for the network.
This is backed up by every way we could find to look at the problem, from the volume of mail delivered by the post office, to scaling laws that have been found to be ubiquitous in social networks.
And I thought the Facebook hate was mainly in the tech circles. I guess it's a real "thing". 100 registrations per second can't all be HNers.
EDIT: This is what I'm talking about http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/crypto-weaknesses-in...
On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry" sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order). Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.
Although, knowing Zuckerberg, I equally accept all the "conspiracy" explanations in the thread :)
Updated story: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-...
It seems to me that the already massive rate at which WhatsApp users were fleeing to Telegram has accelerated to the point Telegram can't handle it anymore either.
For example, the "remove account" is not as efficient (for example, there's extra locking performed), and since removals are thought to be rare nobody bothered with its performance.
http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
Strangely, there have no status update so far regarding the issue:
Um .... Whatsapp were bought by Facebook.
Why? What is Telegram their deal?
Also in principle there is end-to-end encryption, which is not a reason I switched. I'm not sure if this feature has been there when the 200k crypto contest went up with its criticism, but in principle it should be completely dependent on the client, which is opensource.
Too bad XMPP/Jabber did not get a breakthrough, what is the reason for that? No user friendly client? Noone putting enough advertising into it; you can't make money with it?
In germany there is currently a hype of Threema. Every magazine and newspaper writes about it being secure with end-to-end encryption. Even IT magazines just write naively about it, ignoring completely that it's closed source and noone can even see slightly behind the curtains.
I rather prefer to see/know the flaws (Telegram) than use a proprietary solution that makes the masses "feel" good. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281338 Even that Threema costs some money makes people more confident of its security, with the reasoning that with a free solution you are not a customer but rather the product and you pay with your data.
My group of friends uses a lot of iMessage, and I really hate the fact that I can neither use an iMessage app sitting in front of a Windows/Linux machine, nor can I use the iMessage app to view/respond to SMS from people who don't have iOS devices.
Who wants to take your phone out of your pocket and hunt and peck on a tiny keyboard when you can just type ~80 wpm on the computer in front of you?
What would make someone prefer using the other device?
I wouldn't even consider replacing that with WhatsApp, specifically because they don't have/allow clients on desktop/laptop devices. As in, I thought about checking WhatsApp out, searched for info on desktop clients, a Trillian plugin, or something, and immediately ruled out using it at all based on the lack of those things.
1) Apple push notifications were the only method of reliably delivering on demand messages to iOS devices, so to provide expected (app in background) behavior on iOS, someone had to provide an always on proxy between XMPP and iOS push notifications, and that proxy had to have your credentials. This required ongoing expense on the server side combined with a client side app.
2) XMPP is connection oriented and doesn't handle the disruption of disconnections and changing IPs/networks when a mobile device roams or transitions from wifi to cellular data.
On the political side, I think GTalk had, by far, the largest network of XMPP users. As I understand it, they've tried to solve some of these problems with proprietary protocol changes which resulted in the Hangouts app and the subsequent dropping of full XMPP support by google: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...