Hey guys!
The timing is perfect to tell you about a great Instant Messaging application called WhatsApp. Now some of you might wonder “why is the timing perfect?” The answer to that is this week’s headline: “Facebook buys mobile application WhatsApp for $19 Billion in cash and stock.”
So how cool is that? You work on an application for 3 years and become billionaires. Sounds good to us 🙂 So what makes this mobile app so amazing? It totally relinquished the need to pay for texting via SMS . Its most useful for keeping in contact with people overseas.
Because of its global appeal, its available in a myriad of languages: English, Arabic, Bokmål, Norwegian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
So exactly how popular can it be? You can use it for free to communicate abroad, its hosted in over 20+ languages, and its hosted across all major platforms. A lot of apps are available for iPhone and Android (they’re the most popular here in the USA), but there’s something to be said if you include Blackberry. Then if you go beyond that, you would include Windows Phone. Where WhatsApp separates itself is that it includes ALL of those platforms plus Symbian and Nokia phones (model specific). This is huge as the last 2 are more popular internationally and gives users the ability to use a great app without having a “smart phone.”
Now there’s only one last piece of information to cap-off this perfect formula that attracted Zuckerberg and Co. to purchase this company. That little stat is that WhatsApp has 450 million active users. 450 MILLION! What they’ve done is absolutely genius: Become available across every major platform in the world, choosing not to store personal information, starting at 99 cents and then offering free service over time, then host this amazing free service in over 20+ languages across the world. Now, why would you want to download this?
Even if you don’t have friends overseas, are you sick of paying for text messaging? Everyone likes saving money, and as long as your friends have WhatsApp you can message each other everyday, all-day, for free.
They offer personal messaging, group messaging, and best of all, quick, free delivery of images, video, and audio media messages! But wait, there’s more: Share location and places, Exchange contacts, Custom wallpaper, Custom notification sounds, Landscape mode, Message timestamps, and Email chat history.
No need to worry about usernames or pins either. When you download WhatsApp just choose a display name, profile picture (or you can go without), and your phone number while integrating flawlessly with your contact book. By doing this once the app is downloaded to your phone you will see everyone you have in your phone that also uses the app. (It only accesses your contact book for this purpose, to save you time from having to contact friends to see who has the app and who doesn’t. WhatsApp does it for you!).
This great mobile app is available to download for free. Even better news is Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as having no interest in making changes anytime soon. “WhatsApp doesn’t store the content. We would be pretty silly to get in the way of that.”
We haven’t had any problems with it and we communicate with plenty of friends all over the place (specifically Zambia, Nigeria, England, and Switzerland). This is a great application and the best part is there are zero plans to change it. Good job!
-TPR
*Photos from WhatsApp Media