I suppose it was inevitable that an App as successful as WhatsApp would eventually attract some attention from one of the big boys. Mark Zuckerburg last night announced that Facebook would be purchasing WhatsApp for a cool $9.5 Billion. Not bad for two developers who left Yahoo to follow their own direction. To be fair to them they left it a long time to sell out; only recently adding a subs charge once a user had trialled WhatsApp for 12 months – pretty reasonable really.
The big question now is what exactly Facebook plan on doing with WhatsApp. Do they continue the current business model, or do they incorporate it into the Facebook App and leach off the juicy info that gets passed through the WhatsApp servers every day from the 400 million+ active users – for marketing purposes of course.
I’m sure we’ll find out eventually, but in the mean time I hope Jim and Brian enjoy the fruits of their success.
Source: [WhatsApp Blog]