4 ms·
In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a
by munk-a 9mo ago
In Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies.
I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
- wanderingstan 9mo agoMight you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.
- nebula8804 9mo agoAnd India too I think. I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)
- qingcharles 9mo agoThis makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.
- RuggedPineapple 9mo agoOrkut was launched in 2004 too
- qingcharles 9mo agoThat's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.
- preisschild 9mo agoIts definitely not the norm though. I live in central europe and never had whatsapp. Sure some companies offer whatsapp support but they also take email.
- ohyoutravel 9mo agoThis seems like the sort of anecdotal experience the post to which you’re responding is talking about haha
- matusp 9mo agoYep, it is a thing in a handful of Western European countries.
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo agoEurope's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoThat might be more likely now given recent events
- _cenw 9mo agoMy pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.
- wongarsu 9mo agoWhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche