Wow, that is a HUGE growth rate for WhatsApp. 450 Million active users already, 72% of whom are active daily.
450 million active users, but who are they? I've never heard of the app or anyone who uses it, and I usually am in the slightly-more-hip-to-technology-although-no-longer-a-teen subset. I'd like to see some demographic breakdown that I didn't find in a scan of the article. Is it used by people who have devices that don't have messaging (like iPads)?
It's very popular in Australia and Asia. I used it in Australia to communicate easily with my parents without paying 40cents/text. I think everyone I knew in Australia had it and used it constantly. It's especially popular in areas where not everyone has unlimited text message plans. Also, my coworker is from Sri Lanka and he uses it to talk to all his friends back home as well. We actually used it to solve problems with one of our units via WhatsApp when he was on vacation. :P
Yup. And data. You create a whatsapp account with your real phone number - that's how you connect with others so easily. No usernames, etc. It just pulls your phone contact list and checks to see if people have accounts.
You don't know anyone from the Pacific Rim. Everybody I know who even knows someone in the Eastern Hemisphere has Whatsapp installed. I had to use it for a while to talk to buddies in Thailand. The people I know who use it regularly are in Thailand, Taiwan and India. It's a useful little app, if naggy. Basically a hipper implementation of Skype.
I don't know about America, but here in the Netherlands, everyone has Whatsapp. Not just teens, my parents have it, cousins, basically everyone with a smartphone. Now, it needs to be noted that we have the highest percentage of Whatsapp users per capita (AFAIK), but it is the default messaging app. Especially groupchats are plentiful and while most conversations are just dicking around, it is very useful from time to time. And fuck, I liked Wapp in part because it wasn't Facebook. I wonder, is this a panicky buy by Facebook, fearing imminent decline? Or a social web bubble about to burst? 19 billion is a gigantic amount of money, that's for sure.