The Internet AND Social Media - Whatsapp Research Paper Examples

Introduction

WhatsApp is one of the worlds most popular and famous smartphone application that was launched in 2009 by two former employees of Yahoo namely Brian Acton and Jan Koum. These two employees worked together for 20 years at Yahoo! Before starting WhatsApp. WhatsApp makes it easy for people all over the globe to send messages to each other. It is mostly used as an alternative or replacement for text SMS. WhatsApp was found in Silicon Valley and the name WhatsApp came from the slang ‘What’s Up?’ .
WhatsApp allows users to deliver and receive messages, information regarding location, pictures, videos and audios to groups and individuals without any cost. Currently WhatsApp has over 800 million users worldwide. Numerous people download applications and never use them but this is not the case with WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the most famous application worldwide with most active users, then it’s WeChat by China and then LINE by Japan .
It has been estimated that WhatsApp has approximately 450 million users monthly, out of which 70% are active users. WhatsApp gives free service for the very first year and then charges $0.99 for the following years. The best part about WhatsApp which differentiates it from other Social Networking websites and applications is that they do not accept advertising .
WhatsApp was developed totally on word of mouth and on the three principles of the founders that are No ads, No games and No advertisements.

Features of WhatsApp

A user of WhatsApp can do the following while using WhatsApp:
The user can set a status on WhatsApp which is visible to all the contacts.
The WhatsApp user can send a message to any person who is also a user of WhatsApp.
A person can create a group of WhatsApp and add or remove users from that group .
Some of the attractive features of WhatsApp are that it is not dependent on the model of the phone, all the phones support WhatsApp. It is also not dependent on the carrier. All the service providers support WhatsApp .

Users prefer WhatsApp over SMS because of the following reasons:

Cost
One of the most attractive feature of WhatsApp is its low cost. WhatsApp promotes itself openly as an application used for sending messages online free of cost.

Social Influence

Many people started using WhatsApp when they heard about it from their peers. For many individuals, the application was suggested to them by their social group and they started using it .

Nature of the Application

Many people got addicted to WhatsApp because of the nature of the application. The messages have no limit in terms of characters and it is free as compared to SMS hence people tend to send more messages with WhatsApp. It was also observed that WhatsApp was believed to be more informal in nature and nature in comparison to SMS. WhatsApp is more common for planning and coordination of social activities .

Instant Response

Users also believe that WhatsApp is much quicker and faster than SMS. It also provides valuable information about the person being online, person is typing or the last time when the user logged on the application .

Acquisition of WhatsApp

Facebook Inc. announced on February 19, 2014 that they are acquiring WhatsApp for US $19 billion. This acquisition adds worth to messaging services that already exists, and bring profits for the company in future as well.

Reason of WhatsApp’s Success

It is at times hard to believe that the actual worth of WhatsApp is US $19 billion. This worth due to the following reasons:

Simplicity

Everything on WhatsApp is very simple. People in this high tech world still demand simplicity and that is what WhatsApp has. It has a plain list of chat screen and the list of contacts. When WhatsApp started it had minimal features which created an attraction for people and with time they introduced new features which were very easy for people to adapt .

Speed

Another attractive point about WhatsApp is that it is very fast. The engineers that designed WhatsApp made sure that even when millions of people use WhatsApp at the same it does not lag. User can send pictures, videos and messages instantly dependent on the internet speed .

Advertisements

Unlike many other social networking websites, WhatsApp is free of advertisements. Many users get annoyed by the pop up ads. But WhatsApp even after almost 6 years of its initiation has still not introduced advertisement although they can earn huge revenue from it .

Conclusion

WhatsApp is accessible for almost all the mobile operating systems like IPhone operating system, BlackBerry, Android etc. WhatsApp is handling a total of ten billion messages each day.
WhatsApp has gained a lot of popularity as compared to other social networking applications. It has been estimated that the downloads for WhatsApp on Android are more than one hundred million .
Various researches show that cost greatly impacts the usage of social media, the peer pressure is one of the main reason for people’s migration to such services. WhatsApp is considered to be more informal in nature as compared to SMS. Now after the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, there is a long way to go for WhatsApp.

References

Church, K., & Oliveira, R. d. (2013). What’s up with WhatsApp? Comparing Mobile Instant Messaging Behaviors with Traditional SMS. Munich.
Olson, P. (2014, August 25). Forbes. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/08/25/whatsapp-hits-600-million-active-users-founder-says/
Pasqua, R. (2014). Fast Take News Brief. Retrieved from http://mecglobal.com/download/134
Terpstra, M. (2013). WhatsApp & privacy. Retrieved from http://www.cs.ru.nl/bachelorscripties/2013/Martijn_Terpstra___0814962___WhatsApp_and_privacy.pdf
Thakur, N. S. (2013). Forensic Analysis of WhatsApp on Android Smartphones. University of New Orleans. Retrieved from http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2736&context=td
Thapliyal, A. (2014, November 20). Tech Untold. Retrieved from Tech Untold Website: http://www.techuntold.com/secret-behind-whatsapp-success-3/