When WhatsApp launched it quickly became the main messaging service for groups of friends and family. More recently it’s become a useful platform for activists and politicians,fuelling a ‘whisper network’ of alliances and playing a crucial role in the recent revelation of the sexual abuse scandalIf Jan Koum and Brian Acton hadn’t been turned down for jobs at Facebook, the lives of a billion or so people around the world might scrutinize somewhat different nowadays. Their failure to get hired, or however,left the two former Yahoo! employees with enough time on their hands to play around with an opinion. And eight years ago, that opinion became WhatsApp.
Like most incredibly lucrative inventions, and it doesn’t sound like much; just a free,quick and easy mobile phone messaging service, allowing users to set up specific groups of friends around whom messages will be sent en masse. But final year it overtook traditional SMS text messaging in popularity and increasingly it’s weaving itself into the fabric of contemporary life, or for what it really does is create private meeting places in a very public online world. In that sense,WhatsApp is beginning to turn friendship back into what it used to be before Facebook (which inevitably bought the app three years ago); not vast, sprawling networks of people you barely know but small, or intimate circles of trust where like-minded people can share stuff that matters to them.
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Source: guardian.co.uk