Facebook To Buy WhatsApp

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."

The good thing, at least...

[mousse-man]

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).

Re:Why Care

[rroman]

In this thread: http://meta.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org] it is pretty obvious, that not only the "fuck beta" people are pissed. In that thread there were many great comments and suggestions to Dice, what is bad with beta and how should they improve it. After zero effort to improve anything, some of the very skilled people stopped to complain and started to do something about it and other people joined them on Soylentnews. Nowadays, I can assure you, that there is almost no topic on Slashdot that doesn't have some "fuck beta" comments, on Soylentnews there are almost zero "fuck beta" comments and there is also pretty on topic discussion. Surely, it isn't perfect yet, but even today, Soylentnews has better discussion than /.

That is ridiculous

[vikingpower]

$19,000,000,000 for an app that does not make money and has 32 employees. IMHO it shows that Facebook is slowly panicking.

Re:Bubble bursting in 3, 2, 1 .....

[michelcolman]

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!"