The immediate reaction from the tech and business world was incredulity. “Do they also get the state of Florida?” one jokester asked.
As far as I can tell, Facebook does not get the state of Florida in the deal. What it does get is a five-year-old, Mountain View-based startup that has become one of the world’s most popular communication services in just the past year. WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by a pair of ex-Yahoo-ers who set out to build a better alternative to standard, SMS-based text messaging. It allows you to chat and shoot texts, pictures, and videos back and forth with friends over the Internet, like Apple’s iMessage, Microsoft’s Skype, BBM, or Facebook Messenger. Not only does WhatsApp have more features than SMS, it’s far cheaper—free for the first year, and just $1 a year after that. It’s particularly useful as a way to chat with friends and family overseas without running up big charges. It also has no ads, although that seems highly likely to change under Facebook ownership.
The downside is that you’re limited to talking to other people who have downloaded the app. The upside is that, unlike iMessage, it’s available on Android as well, so you’re not limited to fellow iPhone owners.
For Facebook, part of WhatsApp’s luster is that it has emerged as the most popular of a cadre of similar mobile messaging apps, including Japan-based Line, China’s WeChat, Korea’s KakaoTalk, and Canada’s Kik. Facebook likely sees it as the strongest bet to end up on top when the global mobile-messaging market eventually shakes out due to network effects. By the time it does, it may have subsumed a huge portion of the world market for text messaging. Right now WhatsApp has just 50 employees. With Facebook’s backing, it’s likely to have the resources to stay a step ahead of smaller competitors.