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If you have teenager offsprings like me (I've a 13 years old son) you can understand that better maybe. I heard the sentence "We don't need Facebook since there
by antirez 13y ago
If you have teenager offsprings like me (I've a 13 years old son) you can understand that better maybe. I heard the sentence "We don't need Facebook since there is Whatsapp" an endless number of times from him and his friends. From my point of view at first this didn't made a lot of sense, I considered Whatsapp a no-cost SMS replacement. The reality is that Groups are a killer feature: my son's school class has a group where they share what are the homework for tomorrow, or just send messages that are much alike what you would write on Facebook as status messages. Then I realized that I also created a group for my friends, like, in one group there is me, my wife, and one couple of friends of us where we plan what to do together. In another group there is our family where we share pictures of my daughter. We are using Whatsapp like Facebook as well... Under this point of view this move makes a lot more sense, I believe Whatsapp is eating Facebook traffic.
- alexdown 13y agotencent's wechat is being used pretty much in the same way. they also have a "photo sharing" feature (wechat "moments") which approximates very well the action of "putting a pic on my fb status for everyone out there to see".
- fastest963 13y agoAre the groups better than what you'd be able make/do on Google Hangouts?
- antirez 13y ago"better" is programmer point of view. From the point of view of users, Whatsapp is simple, does not require an account, and just works. So people use it a lot regardless of the existence of Hangouts and what they can do :-)
- fab13n 13y agoA network's value is correlated to the number of (potential) friends reachable through it, and how easily you can. There are many almost-non-technical reasons why Hangout isn't an adequate replacement for Whatsapp: - not intuitive enough to create and keep hangout groups. I can probably use G+ circles, but that's cumbersome. - I believe that you need a GMail account. There are people without a GMail account I want to reach in group chats, and expecting them to create a new mail account for that feels like too much asking. - the big amorphous G+ blob is so shapeless that we can't think of it It's _possible_ to use Hangouts, possibly with other bits of G+, as a Whatsapp replacement, but it's not easier nor more obvious. Google didn't envision it that way, they wanted you to produce more durable (and searchable) stuff as G+ posts, and to manage access through a circle system that appeals the 5% of the population with an engineering degree. They don't care about technologically-illiterate people, nor those without a GMail account, let alone without a smartphone. But we shouldn't care about why G+ isn't an adequate Whatsapp killer, as Google didn't buy them. What's interesting is, why FB couldn't build it?
- swah 13y agoAnd you can't even turn off Group notifications...
- adnam 13y agoYou can mute them though.