Bloomberg News
Why is FacebookFB +1.12% buying WhatsApp for $19 billion? At this very moment, I am looking at a text file showing me 5,600 possible explanations. That’s how many WhatsApp messages were exchanged between me and a friend in a single three-month period of 2012, when we were averaging about 60 back-and-forth messages a day.
It was probably a time of above-average communication — and the messages were with a woman of great beauty and conversational smarts, so I had my reasons — but it is still a useful window into how instant messaging sits right at the heart of the battle for attention that now dominates the technology industry. Skimming over those messages — from the breezy rituals of good mornings and how are yous to hour-long heart-to-hearts — shows how our phones are still fundamentally communicators, and how chatting, like everything else, is now facilitated by apps.
I was living in Dubai when those 5,600 messages were exchanged, and one of WhatsApp’s most notable traits is that it seems to be significantly more popular outside the U.S. than it is within – almost all of my phone book’s contacts in Europe, the Middle East or Australia are active on WhatsApp, while the ratio is much lower here in America.
At its core, WhatsApp is just a nicely-done messaging app that lets you send text, pictures and video to your friends anywhere, free. Unlike Apple'sAAPL -1.60% iMessage, it works on all the major mobile operating systems; unlike the text messaging services offered by mobile network operators, it doesn’t charge you anything for sending the messages, and it works like modern mobile software, not the primitive SMS applications on most phones.
The problems WhatsApp solves could, in part, also explain why it is less of a big deal at home in the U.S. Most monthly mobile plans here include unlimited text messaging, creating an all-you-can-eat mentality around sending SMS that didn’t exist overseas, where operators often charged per message. And while 310 million Americans share a single nation — and telephone network — in the rest of the world national boundaries between people are more likely to introduce the expensive headache of international calling and text messaging. That’s another problem solved by WhatsApp.