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I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different plat

by amix 11y ago

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago
The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years... I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
- amix 11y ago
  I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid. Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I bought an Ubuntu phone, and here its the netwok effect that stops my friends switching to Telegram or anything else.
  - batrat 11y ago
    "Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      but productivity never was it's intended target - skype was killed on mobile because of shitty notification requiring the app to be on for the longest time, call dropping, software block to 3g calls. basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook) whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.
- sdenton4 11y ago
  Phone numbers as ID is actually a really important innovation. I worked in Kenya for quite a while, and found that many people had email accounts they had no idea how to actually access. Email-based authentication doesn't work for a considerable proportion of the world's population. But cell phones are pretty ubiquitous: This ease of authentication is a big part of why whatsapp is kicking ass in the developing world.
  - sumedh 11y ago
    > they had no idea how to actually access. My mom back in India finds email address and passwords confusing but she immediately understood watsapp and how to send messages to her sister in US.
  - VLM 11y ago
    "email accounts" The plural is an important side issue. I only have one phone and one public phone number. I'm not sure how many email addresses I have, its definitely more than five but less than two dozen? I do know my broadband provider theoretically gave me an email address about a decade ago that I've never used. I hope no one is sending email to that address...
  - rohit_goyal 11y ago
    Interesting. If you think from the UX point of view the cell number is much more convenient than email as people generally have multiple email ids but 1/2 phone ids. Also obviously the fake account issue is much much lower in phone's case compared to email ids.
- sumedh 11y ago
  Watsapp works for me without any issues and its so simple, even my mom could understand it pretty fast. Skype sometimes hangs on my pc and on the phone. Both my pc and phone have a good configuration yet Skype does not play nice.
- technological 11y ago
  Innovation = How reliable their calling system is. Even with proper networks it works very well. I call my family back in india and it works so well without any disturbances. Innovation for whatsapp = Simplicity + Reliability
eva1984 11y ago
Why this is an innovation though? Just because they have fewer engineers to repeat the work that has been done by so many other companies?
mahouse 11y ago
>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time. They are adding new complicated features that all users hate to "increase engagement".
petercooper 11y ago
I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).
- x1024 11y ago
  Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?
  - aandrieiev 11y ago
    Perhaps because providing ad companies with the tools like these is the way to monetize the service?
    - x1024 11y ago
      Well, it seems that idea has failed now. Why else would they be cutting costs?
  - petercooper 11y ago
    I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely. There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble.. There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.
anjc 11y ago
I'm sure you can take a guess as to what Twitter employees do, what with the ad platform, firehouse access, APIs, infrastructure, frontends, celebrity management, support, and then the fact that it's a giant company, so HR, marketing, sales, finance... I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.
princetontiger 11y ago
Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.
- kelseydh 11y ago
  Not to mention Twitter got a lot of its early success from making connections to media companies in television. That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large. Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.
- samstave 11y ago
  Doesnt anyone think that twitter laying off is an attempt by Dorsey to "streamline" and "focus on core competency" as he takes the official CEO reigns again? Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?
tefo-mohapi 11y ago
I agree @amix. More often than not it's asign of poor vision and leadership.
whatsthat 11y ago
800 million users where? I've never seen anyone using it.
- rabite 11y ago
  Every single Arab I know uses Whatsapp. Everyone in Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, etc. Shittons of users in those areas, because phone services are so ludicrously expensive due to state-imposed telecommunications monopolies.
- petemcc 11y ago
  Almost everybody I know in the UK uses it, a lot.
applecore 11y ago
Twitter's third-quarter revenue is expected to be around $560 million USD. WhatsApp is certain to be a major source of revenue for Facebook, but right now it's de minimis.

by amix 11y ago

Al-Khwarizmi 11y ago

The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years... I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.

amix 11y ago
I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid. Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
- collyw 11y ago
  I bought an Ubuntu phone, and here its the netwok effect that stops my friends switching to Telegram or anything else.
- batrat 11y ago
  "Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    but productivity never was it's intended target - skype was killed on mobile because of shitty notification requiring the app to be on for the longest time, call dropping, software block to 3g calls. basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook) whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.
sdenton4 11y ago
Phone numbers as ID is actually a really important innovation. I worked in Kenya for quite a while, and found that many people had email accounts they had no idea how to actually access. Email-based authentication doesn't work for a considerable proportion of the world's population. But cell phones are pretty ubiquitous: This ease of authentication is a big part of why whatsapp is kicking ass in the developing world.
- sumedh 11y ago
  > they had no idea how to actually access. My mom back in India finds email address and passwords confusing but she immediately understood watsapp and how to send messages to her sister in US.
- VLM 11y ago
  "email accounts" The plural is an important side issue. I only have one phone and one public phone number. I'm not sure how many email addresses I have, its definitely more than five but less than two dozen? I do know my broadband provider theoretically gave me an email address about a decade ago that I've never used. I hope no one is sending email to that address...
- rohit_goyal 11y ago
  Interesting. If you think from the UX point of view the cell number is much more convenient than email as people generally have multiple email ids but 1/2 phone ids. Also obviously the fake account issue is much much lower in phone's case compared to email ids.
sumedh 11y ago
Watsapp works for me without any issues and its so simple, even my mom could understand it pretty fast. Skype sometimes hangs on my pc and on the phone. Both my pc and phone have a good configuration yet Skype does not play nice.
technological 11y ago
Innovation = How reliable their calling system is. Even with proper networks it works very well. I call my family back in india and it works so well without any disturbances. Innovation for whatsapp = Simplicity + Reliability

eva1984 11y ago

Why this is an innovation though? Just because they have fewer engineers to repeat the work that has been done by so many other companies?

mahouse 11y ago

>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time. They are adding new complicated features that all users hate to "increase engagement".

petercooper 11y ago

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).

x1024 11y ago
Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?
- aandrieiev 11y ago
  Perhaps because providing ad companies with the tools like these is the way to monetize the service?
  - x1024 11y ago
    Well, it seems that idea has failed now. Why else would they be cutting costs?
- petercooper 11y ago
  I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely. There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble.. There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

anjc 11y ago

I'm sure you can take a guess as to what Twitter employees do, what with the ad platform, firehouse access, APIs, infrastructure, frontends, celebrity management, support, and then the fact that it's a giant company, so HR, marketing, sales, finance... I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.

princetontiger 11y ago

Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.

kelseydh 11y ago
Not to mention Twitter got a lot of its early success from making connections to media companies in television. That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large. Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.
samstave 11y ago
Doesnt anyone think that twitter laying off is an attempt by Dorsey to "streamline" and "focus on core competency" as he takes the official CEO reigns again? Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?

tefo-mohapi 11y ago

I agree @amix. More often than not it's asign of poor vision and leadership.

whatsthat 11y ago

800 million users where? I've never seen anyone using it.

rabite 11y ago
Every single Arab I know uses Whatsapp. Everyone in Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, etc. Shittons of users in those areas, because phone services are so ludicrously expensive due to state-imposed telecommunications monopolies.
petemcc 11y ago
Almost everybody I know in the UK uses it, a lot.

applecore 11y ago

Twitter's third-quarter revenue is expected to be around $560 million USD. WhatsApp is certain to be a major source of revenue for Facebook, but right now it's de minimis.