Facebook To Buy WhatsApp 199
Facebook has announced an agreement to buy WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform used by over 450 million people. The deal involves $4 billion in cash and an additional $12 billion in Facebook stock. They say WhatsApp will remain independent; its headquarters won't move, and it will continue to exist separately from Facebook's Messenger app. Mark Zuckerberg indicated they will focus on growth: 'Over the next few years, we're going to work hard to help WhatsApp grow and connect the whole world. We also expect that WhatsApp will add to our efforts for Internet.org, our partnership to make basic internet services affordable for everyone.' On WhatsApp's blog, they say, "Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing. WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently."
Oh Good (Score:5, Insightful)
We also expect that WhatsApp will add to our efforts for Internet.org, our partnership to make basic internet services affordable for everyone
Yet another attempt to control the Internet.
They're coming. And they will not stop until they own it or destroy it.
The Internet is humanity's last chance, boys and girls. We lose it and we're looking at 1000 years of darkness.
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Join the Resistance! Enlightened seeks to enslave us to the .... wait this isn't an Ingress thread is it?
Re:Oh Good (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is humanity's last chance, boys and girls.
Yep, Skype's gone, and now WhatsApp will be ruined.
Are there any open and demonstrably secure voice/video chat/IM etc applications in the pipeline that anyone's aware of?
Re:Oh Good (Score:4, Informative)
Was WhatsApp ever secure or open? Wasn't it just a proprietary wrapper for xmpp?
There are other jabber/xmpp/jingle clients out there. I'm not sure what is the best client but pidgin works well for most things IIRC. Miranda IM may also be worth a look, or Adium. All three are a GPL or similar license I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And if you connect to a "server", you already lost.
Only truly decentralized solutions will save you. Neither Skype or WhatsApp ever were that.
"Internet" is broken at many layers, starting from DNS and SSL, fix the trust models first and everything else can follow after.
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Well, there aren't really any apps that satisfy all of that. Open-source, secure, video and mobile. Thought the post I was replying to did not specify mobile (although that's WhatsApp's main platform I guess). But the Point I was trying to make is that WhatsApp didn't satisfy those requirements either. It wasn't open, nor secure.
Anyways. there is Xabber for Android -- but I don't think that has video. Also many Android users use Google Hangouts / Talk etc for chat and video, but that is not open-sourc
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RedPhone and TextSecure can do voice and text: https://whispersystems.org/ [whispersystems.org]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Try Threema. Fully encrypted. But not free. And nobody you know will have it, most likely.
In any case I wonder at so much money paid for an app to which the telecom operators can put an end to in 2 weeks, just by dropping to 0 the price of messaging. Risky, I'd say.
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I use WhatsApp and have unlimited free SMS. WhatsApping is useless for me in a 1v1 conversation, but group chats are where the attraction lies. Also my sister isn't officially allowed to send private messages from her work phone, but WhatsApp circumvents that.
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They're after the user base, and were afraid WhatsApp was becoming to big a competitor. They're no competitor anymore.
And besides, WhatsApp is more than SMS has on offer - can send photos etc, group chat, whatever. Pretty much everything Facebook is useful for (the News Feed used to be the strong point of Facebook, until they fucked that one up: I get messages posted "one hour ago" a few screen pages deep in my feed, in between day-before-yesterday's messages; plus messages of pages that I like are simply n
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XMPP, as always, continues to cover everything. Open standard, lots of open source implementations, de-centralized, IM, voice, and video.
But people will still use whatever has the best marketing.
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Check out Threema https://threema.ch/en/ [threema.ch]
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The hipocrisy on an ONG that want to impose closed protocols with closed source clients is incredible. And people just fall right into it!
Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 ..... (Score:3, Insightful)
$16 billion for a messaging app? The end is nigh...
Re:Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, $16B ($4B, really, who's counting fb stock?) for:
( plus underlying tech, as simple as it is )
And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.
Re:Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 ..... (Score:4, Insightful)
And this promise that nothing's going to change? Laughable. If nothing else it will receive facebook branding (subtle, such as color changes) pretty quickly, and the only reason to build it out further is so that they can reap even further benefits (read: more users) over to facebook at a later point.
"Independent"? Nothing will change? LOL. They are in for a big surprise if they actually believe Facebook's line of bullshit. And here's a short piece of one of their blog entries:
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index... [whatsapp.com]
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.
Now that Facebook has spent $4 Billion Dollars (the $12 Billion in funny money is irrelevant) these guys are in for a rude awakening.
Re:Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 ..... (Score:4, Interesting)
So this is how you make big bucks on the internet nowadays:
1. Launch a service that does something people really want without any of the annoyances of other similar services (ads, privacy intrusions,...) and without trying to make much money. Maybe even lose money, who cares.
2. Get lots of users who appreciate the fact that somebody is finally catering to their needs without constantly trying to milk them for information or bombard them with ads.
3. Sell to some big company like FaceBook for billions of dollars, which then proceeds to add the usual annoyances like ads and privacy intrusions after having promised not to do so.
4. Goto 1.
Rude awakening, you say? I bet they're just yelling "Profit!"
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($4B, really, who's counting fb stock?)
Brian Acton and Jan Koum. [forbes.com]
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I don't think Facebook care if they move users over from WhatsApp or not. They don't care as much about the users as they do about their data. As long as the data can be cross referenced at the back end, then who cares if the end user's front end is totally different?
This is the way that Facebook needs to evolve. They've realised that teenagers (tomorrow's consumers) don't want to hang out on the social network that their parents use. So you establish/buy/build another social application that has the a
Re: Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 ..... (Score:2)
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It's world-wide. We use it to "text" family in Central Asia. We get one of the younger ones to get the older ones onto Skype for a video call but often just for regular quick short messages, pictures, videos, etc. The older generation doesn't seem to have it on their phones, which tend toward the simpler, usually.
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The user base is significant (and the private information that comes with it) but I agree that there's a tech bubble many times bigger than the 98's. I wonder how much will the big investors get out of it before it bursts.
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$16 bln for one less serious competitor for your many-times-that empire? Deal.
so (Score:1, Funny)
That's pronounced what-a-sap, right?
Next up... (Score:1)
449.99 million people ditched WhatsApp.
will continue to exist (Score:2)
Not for long.
Ok.. (Score:1)
WhatsApp is dead... WhatsNext?
Like ping ball games (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember where the scores on pinball machines were sane then one day I saw the ST TNG pinball and the score was like in the millions. Was like WTF? The pricing on some of these virtual companies is the same.
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Virtual companies, virtual currency, virtual value...
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3500 cents per user. At a fraction of a cent per user per dataset sold, that's going to be a lot of marketing demographic / dat mining pulls to even think about breaking even. It's one thing to sell click-though or impression adds for fractional cents (on average, sure you might get 10c on some, but not everyone is a homosexual male 22-35 with a 6+ figure income), but there's currently no ad stream for this set.
As for monetizing the product, we've moved out of desktop and winmobile apps that could reasonab
And if they make me have a Facebook account... (Score:5, Insightful)
... UNINSTALL! I refuse to have a Facebook account and if Whatsapp starts making it mandatory to have one, then I'll go back to plain old SMS.
Re:And if they make me have a Facebook account... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too late, you already have a Facebook account, everyone on the internet does.
You just don't know the password yet.
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Thanks to biometric face reading techniques this is true. Any photo of you that is on there has enough biometric data for them to uniquely identify you and who you hang out with. And people can even tag your name to the photo if you don't have an account, so they get a name to match with the biometric data. Then they can know who your friends are and family. are, the places where you go and probably some other stuff. All this because someone took some photos of you and posted them.
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Facebook says they don't, law suits against Facebook Ireland say they do (and that it's a violation of EU data privacy laws) [slashdot.org].
Personally, I think it would be too easy for a company that has the data on hand, and no concept of "boundaries" or "no, that's creepy" to resist. They already have millions of users complete address books from the find a friend feature, faces of people they know IRL tagged in photos, locations from check-ins, etc. it's just a matter of writing the right queries to tie them all togeth
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Or move to LINE. That one has almost as many users as WhatsApp already.
Which leads me to wonder: is Facebook going to play money-bag whack-a-mole with every new social network that shows up? That's going to get expensive really fast.
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Yes, that is exactly what is going on. That's the only way to put anything like these supposed values on companies that don't produce revenue.
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If you've used WhatsApp, you already have one.
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Use these instead... https://whispersystems.org/ [whispersystems.org]
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I've got facebook.com and fbcdn.com and friends blocked. It's surprising how many pages link to one of those sites.
sixteen billion??? (Score:3)
Re:sixteen billion??? (Score:5, Insightful)
nah, seems more like they are throwing cash at every company that mimics in a superior manner any piece of fb people used to use. Chat and images are the big two,
the problem is, any new company can come along and start the same service, at which point fb will have to buy them as well. this was the story with instagram, they then tried to buy snapchat, and now bought whatsapp.
Facebook's Next Defensive Purchase... (Score:2)
This is news for nulls (Score:1)
That's why the many millions and billions. We rather need news that financially measures in micro-mills.
I'm serious.
Wow, I guess I am super old and out of touch now (Score:1)
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A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.
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You'll note that WhatsApp doesn't have a whole lot of usage in the US. It's quite popular in Europe and the South America.
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It is not like IM was invented yesterday you know? Some of us have better things to do than figure out what's the irrelevant app of the day.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
It is not like IM was invented yesterday you know? Some of us have better things to do than figure out what's the irrelevant app of the day.
I've never heard of it either and I'm not that old, maybe it's only popular in certain regions? One of those third world fads?
I get the impression that it is popular in *cough* certain countries *cough* where the telcos freely rape their customers over text messages and mobile data.
Where I live (Sweden), I get unlimited texting and nearly unlimited (5GB/mo) data for about 50 bucks a month. Since this is a very typical plan from a very typical Scandinavian carrier (Telenor), I am not surprised that I've neither seen nor heard of this app before.
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Does your carrier charge you for txt? Lolz (Score:5, Insightful)
You've never heard of it? Are you still using your carrier's txt plan? Lolz
Why wouldn't I? I can text anyone anywhere in the world for free, and I don't have to worry about whether we're using the same service and if they actually still check that service or blah blah blah. And services like WhatsApp are tied to phone numbers anyways, so WhatsApp users are just a subset of people with numbers I could text to.
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Free for you, but probably not for some of the people you're texting. In a reasonable world everyone's incoming texts would be free, but we do not live in such a world.
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In a reasonable world everyone's incoming texts would be free, but we do not live in such a world.
I have never paid for incoming texts (in the UK) - I think the rest of the world outside the USA is reasonable as I've only heard of that practice happening in the USA. I used to be pay as you go for years although in January I started a one-month repeating package of unlimited texts and unlimited internet for £12 (which Google tells me is about $20).
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I have a smartphone on the cheapest plan I could find ($29/m). The plan has pathetically small downloads (200mb) but even then I get 400 free txt messages with no additional fee for international.
I thought that almost free SMS was as standard part of contracts the world over now. Even pre-paid services here often include about 200 free messages.
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400 texts is nothing. I use more than 500 texts every day. without whatsapp that's not feasible.
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Yeah tell me about it. I don't know why anyone would talk about "normal" people when edge cases like us exist right?
You know you're 1/10th of the way towards the world record right? Somehow I really doubt that there's 400million of you in the world. Somehow I doubt there's more than 4000 of you.
There you go (Score:4, Insightful)
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Messaging? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. There are tons and tons of ways to send messages to people last I checked. Why is this one worth "$16B"?
2. Who still pays for SMS messages? I've had unlimited texting plans for the better part of a decade, and they're cheaper than most people's cable TV bills. Are text messages significantly expensive outside of the US?
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Well, people in Europe still suffer from text messages costing money if sent across borders. Anachronistic with a culture that thrives more and more on international communication, but that needs some sort of fix.
And WA was that fix. Dunno what I'll use now.
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Domestic SMS is cheap. But internationally (and in Europe, "international" is something you can get quite easily, there's hardly a country with spots within its borders that has more than 1000 miles to a different country) you'd assume they're using carrier pigeons to deliver, considering the price, speed and reliability.
Re:Messaging? (Score:5, Informative)
It's Jabber, but without the hassle of account creation. Username is automatically set up as your phone number, and password is your IMEI or something.
So it's about as secure as SMS, but also as practical for technophobes. It's free of charge and allows much more data than SMS (file transfer of pics etc.), which is why people use it.
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It's Jabber, but without the hassle of account creation. Username is automatically set up as your phone number, and password is your IMEI or something.
Jabber with the most important part stripped off: de-centralization. And no voice/video support either.
Re:Messaging? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's more than yet another SMS replacement.
It can do cross-mobile-platform IM, group chats, file sharing (video and audio mostly) and as of recent push to talk communication. Also, the phone number is your user account - everyone of your phone contacts will show up in your WA contact list if they use it. Many agree it is the tidies and simplest messenger for mobile platforms around.
On the downside there is their shitty data protection and blatant security faults in the past. On Android, you can't switch off presence and reading confirmations which is quite unfortunate if your boss or knows your phone number - they will always be able to check when you were last on.
As much as I'd love to dispose WhatsApp, I have given up any attempt to do so. Once you registered, you can't unregister (or rather, the function does nothing) and people will continue to send you things. I resigned and tell everyone to not send any sensible information over this service and I use a modded Android app (WhatsApp+ ... you can find the project page on Google+) which allows me to hide my online status.
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Yes you can uninstall. But I wrote unregister - thus unsubscribe from the service and disappear from everyone's contact list. Last times I unregistered, I still was available as a contact. For others it appeared as if I just never read the message when in fact it was lost. Even after registering again, the messages sent during my absence were not delivered.
As said, they want to keep it simple. They won't provide a desktop client and you can't use one account on multiple devices either. No hopes that will ev
Re: Messaging? (Score:2)
International sms costs money and lots if people have friends and family around the world
And kids are using thesr apps for privacy reasons
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Recently (last two years), I have noticed that most of the messaging activities between my contacts and I have be gradually shifting from Wh
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I currently live in Asia. Whatsapp is very, very popular over here.
A good number of my European contacts are also using it.
I don't know how popular it is in the USA.
I find it a very useful piece of software, one of the most used apps on my iphone.
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I read the web site, and I still don't understand what this web site is all about. Is it really just yet another messaging platform designed to get around SMS messaging charges? Am I missing something obvious?
1. There are tons and tons of ways to send messages to people last I checked. Why is this one worth "$16B"?
They pay for the userbase.
2. Who still pays for SMS messages? I've had unlimited texting plans for the better part of a decade, and they're cheaper than most people's cable TV bills. Are text messages significantly expensive outside of the US?
Yes, outside the US prices vary a lot. I pay, what you'd percieve as 20-50cents per message. I know other countries do have free SMS. Some plans here have free SMS, but they're the extremely expesive ones.
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After you remove the massive overlap between these claimed 450 million and FaceBook's claimed 1.3 billion or so accounts, and even wider database of identities, you can map the remaining 37 people ;)
LMBO (Score:2)
When is fuckedcompany.com coming back?
Or is it just too sad to see that the internet is basically ran by 1/1000th of the amount of manpower in the 90's with 1000X the power/capacity?
The good thing, at least... (Score:4, Interesting)
will be that WHEN the bubble blows, only shareholders will be left to hold the bag, not taxpayers (except maybe through bad investment into their retirement funds).
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Somewhere in an office in Seongnam (Score:3)
That is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
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Spending 19B on something in panicing? I wish I had the means to panic!
Shameful (Score:2)
Honestly, there should be a viable, easy-to-use alternative to Facebook which respects your privacy and doesn't have shady dealings with a government and isn't run by a functionally retarded man-child. But if there is one, well I don't know about it. And if I don't know about it, then 95% of people don't know about it.
Same with WhatsApp. It's very useful, but this isn't advanced AI here: it's pretty clear what it does and how it does it. Where is the good, user-friendly, open-source alternative?
I'm also pis
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Honestly, there should be a viable, easy-to-use alternative to Facebook which respects your privacy and doesn't have shady dealings with a government and isn't run by a functionally retarded man-child. But if there is one, well I don't know about it. And if I don't know about it, then 95% of people don't know about it.
I concurs, but sadly, most people don't, and that's why we don't have such an alternative. :(
Alternatives? (Score:2)
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With that name one can think it's an actual telegram service, e.g. you can send an electronic message that's delivered by mail or courier on the last mile.
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And 4-digit UIDs are still available!
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I already have one, but thanks just the same.
Why Care (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would I want to join a site where all of the other idiots that keep posting Beta messages over stories have gone to?
Good riddance, I say. Slashdot has been pretty good over the last week or so.
Good luck with your proto-Digg. You're gonna need it.
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The fact that there are no "Fuck Beta" articles at Soylent is irrelevant. There are none on the "Daring Fireball" blog either, for obvious reasons - that's not where you'd expect to find them.
Furthermore, while Soylent doesn't yet have a huge number of comments it's clear there is a committed community of interested readers that like the site. So it's got lots of hope and lots of promise. I think it's early to boast "Soylent has better comments" but there's certainly proof the gang is heading in that dir
Re:Why Care (Score:4, Informative)
We gave them feedback in October, and they ignored it.
When the beta was re-revealed in January they hadn't even touched the biggest issue, that the comment system was fundamentally broken (not "it's got bugs" broken, but "the design is completely wrong" broken).
Consequently there was lots of gnashing of teeth that they _still_ didn't understand that this was the core feature, and everyone that had been paying attention gave up on any hope that they would address it.
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While I agree the agitation has blown the issue out of proportion, software lifecycle?
Do you know what beta means? Full features, probably significant bugs, useful but not necessarily stable. The slashdot beta does not satisfy those criteria. The lack of features make it an early alpha.
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And it's a horrorshow - it takes the worst of Slashdot and the worst of Slashdot Beta, mixes them up and... the sum is worse than the parts.
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While we're at it, question marks aren't lead
That's right, they're not made from Element #82.
with a space
(They're not preceded by spaces, either.)
and they belong on the inside of quotation marks.
Sometimes Yes, sometimes No; it depends on the context. If you're asking a question about what's quoted, then the question mark goes on the outside. So in this case, he's right and you're wrong.
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Spoken like a true "Younger people" who, for some reason that escapes me, think they have a life somehow more noteworthy than every other living thing on the planet.
As for the business strategy, maybe you are right, or maybe the "separation" is to give at least the appearance of competition in that space or the non-appearance of an all-seeing eye.
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You thinking that people over 35 are old means you are very soon going to be in hot water. Breaking news: you are going to be joining us the "uncool" RSN!
My young adult kids think I'm cool and that is all that really matters when you are "old". I always thought that facebook was a load of crap and have never bothered with it.
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They're not only stealing a few hundreds million phone numbers, they steal the phone directories or at least subsets of them.