Facebook acquired
WhatsApp(World's most popular messaging Service) for whooping $19 billion just
a few days back, which is the largest ventured-backed acquisition in the
history. This comes rather, as not a big surprise given the fact that
Whats App has surpassed the Facebook's instant messaging service Facebook
Messenger, in the developing economies such Brazil,South Africa,Indonesia and
China.
Currently Facebook has around 1 billion users and it hopes to gain another 1 billion users through its Global Expansion policy,acquiring Whats App was just the first step in its plans.
Facebook wanted to buy a true messaging app to complement Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp was the obvious choice thanks to the simple utility and skyrocketing global popularity.
“Messenger evolved from Facebook chat which was more instant messaging, not SMS ... a lot of messages aren't real-time. Whats App evolved from the model of replacing SMS,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call on Wednesday afternoon. “Those are two pretty big and different use cases and the world needs both.”
Both Facebook and Whats App founders and employees get a handsome benefit,but the Whats App users are the ones who are going to come out at the losing end.
The two major concerns are:
Privacy Issues:
Facebook has long been accounted for collecting users personal data in unauthorized way,and losing the data as fast as it collects them,now it has access to users phone book and other personal information that the user may not be willing to provide.Facebook collects these information saying that it helps to provide better search results and to display appropriate ads.
Ads:
Whats App currently has more than 450 million registered users and the number increases by 1 million everyday, a company with such a large base of customers has long been a militant towards advertising.But a similar thing happened with Instagram when the Facebook similar kind of promises where made, but now all kind of ads are seen by Instagram Users.
Down-sight:
As WhatsApp falls into the Facebook fold, though, you can bet that the undisputed King of social network hopes to build it into a messaging application that dominates its rivals.We are not yet sure how Whats App's data will be useful for Facebook for its future plans, but $19 billion is not a big thing that the social networking giant cannot afford to diminish the competition, which may become a threat in the near future.
But anytime you diminish competition you also diminish innovation, which is both bad for users and developers.
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