Just few days before the 8th birthday of the most powerful and famous messaging app worldwide, Whatsapp announced that it’s celebrating by going back to its roots.
Whatsapp is introducing a new ephemeral multimedia status feature. The new status sharing feature is rolling out across Europe this week and most likely will hit the rest of the rest of the world in the following weeks.
The background story of Whatsapp:
Jan Koum the founder of Whataspp, formulated the concept of the now-messaging app because he was tired of the gym’s no-call allowed policy, so the idea of an application with people’s status beside their name was born.
This is why it is called “Whatsapp”, letting your friends know “what’s up” with you. Jan Koum didn’t instantly hit it off with Whatsapp, he then approached his colleague and friend from his days working at Yahoo, Brian Acton.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton had both been denied working at Facebook and since Acton had time on his hands, he thought it would be a great partnership worth pursuing.
On the 24th of Feb., 2009 -and on the same day Jan Koum was born- Whatsapp was launched. Back then it was only a status-notifying application, whenever someone updated their status with a simple tick, it would ping their friends to let them know.
When Apple launched the push notifications in June 2009, Koum updated WhatsApp to version 2.0 with messaging features, leading to the increase of users to 250,000.
Imitating Snapchat or simply back to basics:
Is the suspiciously snapchat look-alike feature announcement a mere coincidence to Whatsapp 8th birthday? Or is Facebook imitating Snapchat yet again with Whatsapp like it did with Instagram getting closer to Snap’s IPO on Thursday March 2nd?
Facebook has acquired Whatsapp back in 2014, at the closing price of $19billion adding $3billion on the original price in the form of restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing.
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In a recent interview Mr. Safara of Whatsapp stated that: “We operate in a largely independent way from Facebook,” and added that Whatsapp does not plan to introduce ads into the new status feature.
Now, WhatsApp 1.2 billion monthly users can post photos, videos and GIFs as their status, which lasts for 24 hours before disappearing. WhatsApp users can also send their status updates as messages to individual or multiple friends at once, totally safe with Whatsapp’s End-to-End encryption.
Mr. Safara said: “Obviously we’re all seeing broad adoption of this format across the industry right now,” following by: “Our hope is that with this update, people will find new ways to share and consume media on WhatsApp, too.”
As the stats reports that Whatsapp users are sending 50 billion messages each day, which includes 3.3 billion photos, 760 million videos, and 80 million GIFs. Over the last year, the number of photos sent daily has doubled while the number of videos have tripled.
Imitation or innovation, Happy Birthday, Whatsapp.
