As Paul mentioned in yesterday’s Chatterbox, the Internet couldn’t decide whether to explode or implode at yesterday afternoon’s news that Facebook is set to buy messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion. Here’s a two-part, semi-educated guess as to why Zuckerberg, et al. would be willing to pay the same amount that the U.S. military plans to spend on radars by the year 2022 on an app that’s little-known outside circles of tech, foreign travelers, and tweens.
For starters, kids maybe just don’t like Facebook anymore, according to some much-ballyhooed studies, and Facebook is worried about jumping the shark. WhatsApp is increasingly cited as an alternative by the world’s youth. There’s weight to that idea, but it’s just the less compelling reason.
Here’s the other, more poignant one: If you’ve travelled abroad recently and not wanted to shell out for an exorbitant international cell plan, chances are you’ve used WhatsApp for messaging your abroad friends or travel partners, because basically all you need to use it is an internet connection, a smartphone, and fingers. So, alongside an advantage in the mobile imperative that’s already well established with tech companies in the Western world, WhatsApp could give Facebook a potential <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+to+bring+facebook+to+the+developing+world&oq=zuckerberg+to+bring+facebook+to+the+developing+world&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i59.630j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8
“>early foothold in the coveted developing/mobile market.
It’s no secret that the biggest entities in tech have been after those nascent dollars for a time now, and regardless of the price tag this could be a real coup against Google, who had been courting WhatsApp themselves. And, as suggested/indicated by Google’s lofty goals for Google X and Project Loon, and Zuckerberg’s thinly veiled launch of Internet.org (a non-profit!), the emerging market is where they think the money is, or at least where they think it will be. And they’re probably right—that is, as long as we don’t flush the planet down the toilet before that market has a chance.
