Facebook Is Buying WhatsApp for $16B

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Who decided this was worth $16 billion? Oh wait, I guess Facebook just did.

Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing.
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I think its stupid as hell to buy something at its peak. Whatsapp will just go down from here. I would buy something when its worth nothing, past its peak, I.e. MySpace then revive it, or, buy something before its popular for cheap. Instead, at a peak, it costs a fortune and will just go down.
 
Time to find a new group chat program. You know damn well that FB is going to gay it up and require a FB logon to use it or some shit.
 
nvgrim said:
Time to find a new group chat program. You know damn well that FB is going to gay it up and require a FB logon to use it or some shit.
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"gay it up?" lol, what's this board's age demographic?
 
I'm not sure which I hate more, a company that pays such an outrageous amount of money for an app or the people who make such trivial things popular.

Why the fuck do people even use it? SMS/Hangouts isn't enough?
 
Why the fuck do people even use it? SMS/Hangouts isn't enough
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I wondered that myself and did some googling. Evidently in a lot of countries outside the US, data plans are cheap/unlimited, while they pay through the nose for texts. This is essentially text/MMS/email done through IP/data. In the US it doesn't make as much sense, as most people have unlimited text/mms but low/expensive data caps. I guess facebook is just paying for the users and hope to integrate it somehow into facebooks mobile app messenger.
 
Well, there goes the entire IPO stash. Amazing for all their engineers they couldn't figure out how to to send text and pictures over the internet. If only there was like, a protocol for that...I'd call it an internet protocol.
 
Amazing amount of money for what amounts to a cross mobile platform version of MSN Messenger.
 
forcefed said:
First year the app is free, then its 99c per year. Still i think the userbase is the gold mine that facebook is after.
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Bingo,

Facebook is losing users and fast, facebook is old and the thing of yesteryear, this is their attempt to stay relevant.

The article states they wont change anything and keep it as a separate brand but you know behind the scenes they will be tracking everything.

Just as MS took over Skype, and slowly combined it with MSN.
 
LC155 said:
As a European, fuck off. Now I have to find something else.
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Try Kakao talk.
It uses data for texts, images and calls.
My order uses it for Rage of Bahamut to coordinate holy wars and castle crasher events.
Works a lot better that groupme and kik IMHO.

I used to use Whatsapp to talk to my Verizon buddies with limited texts, then Palringo, then kick tthen groupme, then kakao and we all love it.
 
What you are watching, gentlemen, is the next tech bubble in the making.
And when this one goes belly up, chances are it'll be big. Likely because all those other app companies that tech companies 'phagocytized' failed to turn a real profit in the long run.

This looks like credit default swaps in the tech industry.
 
whatsapp is stupid, it is only made possible but moronic cell phone carriers who insist on pillaging people with texting. If the cell phone providers were smarter and gave texting away, they could control this market, even put in ads.

On a side note is anyone else demoralized by the state of messaging in the WORLD? You would think by now in 2014 people would have worked something out. Something universal like email. But to this day we still go through these 5 year cycles of a new chat program replacing the last one over and over. IRC,ICQ,AIM,MSN,SMS,FB,Whatsapp the list goes on and on and the problem is never solved.
 
rudy said:
On a side note is anyone else demoralized by the state of messaging in the WORLD? You would think by now in 2014 people would have worked something out. Something universal like email. But to this day we still go through these 5 year cycles of a new chat program replacing the last one over and over. IRC,ICQ,AIM,MSN,SMS,FB,Whatsapp the list goes on and on and the problem is never solved.
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Look at it this way...

how old is the keyboard? :D

The idea IM is simple. So why make it complicated?
Anything after IRC, ICQ and AIM was just fluff and built on this basic idea.
 
jflail2 said:
Yup, and I'd hazard a guess that ads in some capacity aren't far behind with FB in the driver's seat now.
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That's the funny part. There's a blog post on the whataapp website from 2012, here's part of it:

Why we don’t sell ads

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
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I think these guys are in for a big surprise when Facebook takes over. Of course, they might not care. Getting bought by Facebook just made then rich.
 
rudy said:
whatsapp is stupid, it is only made possible but moronic cell phone carriers who insist on pillaging people with texting. If the cell phone providers were smarter and gave texting away, they could control this market, even put in ads.

On a side note is anyone else demoralized by the state of messaging in the WORLD? You would think by now in 2014 people would have worked something out. Something universal like email. But to this day we still go through these 5 year cycles of a new chat program replacing the last one over and over. IRC,ICQ,AIM,MSN,SMS,FB,Whatsapp the list goes on and on and the problem is never solved.
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Realistically all Google would have to do is put out gchat clients for IOS and WP8, it's already natively included in Android.
 
Kor said:
Realistically all Google would have to do is put out gchat clients for IOS and WP8, it's already natively included in Android.
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Except Google killed off gchat and it became "Hangouts" which is half broken and only 50% feature complete compared to its predecessor.
 
Apparently the guy that ran WhatsApp was turned down for a job by both Facebook and Twitter. After netting a cool $16B from Facebook, I think it's probably safe to say it would have been much cheaper if they had just hired the dude :rolleyes:.
 
damn it. another "Microsoft-ed" application coming right up! I've only just started using (about 6 months) and its UI is excellent. It was one of the VERY few (and ever diminishing) applications that had that true application-ness about it (i.e. more UI for ads then for its actual use/UI that fails at being a UI/functionality set that is half of what it used to be before "easy of use" and "social numbing" got "integrated")

ah well. that's one more quality application down. I live in AUS and the TXT pricing here is , shall we say, not great.
 
I heard better things about LINE, but honestly didn't have much use for either.
 
Kor said:
Realistically all Google would have to do is put out gchat clients for IOS and WP8, it's already natively included in Android.
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Its called google hangouts now and it is available for iOS. I don't know about windows phone but no one uses it.

But yes the carriers are literally risking losing control of texting because they are so stupid. They are control freaks who always lose control and create monopolies because of it.
 
nvgrim said:
Time to find a new group chat program. You know damn well that FB is going to gay it up and require a FB logon to use it or some shit.
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Like they did with Instagram?

Don't be stupid.
 
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