It’s always fascinating to see the growth of a communications platform. The mobile phone grew worldwide thanks to a company called Nokia that connected people with calls and SMS as the medium, but in this age of apps and Smartphones, it’s Whatsapp that’s doing all the connecting. We have been watching its explosive growth over the course of two years, and it has been really interesting. Today, the company’s blog has announced that the service has crossed a whopping 400 million monthly active users, with almost a quarter of them – 100 million added in the last four months. This is seen as a huge growth for a space, in which there is suddenly a lot of competition, with some of them even willing to shell out big bucks for TV promotions and so on. However, it remains to be seen if people embrace choice or go for ubiquity.
Today, we’re proud to announce that because of you, WhatsApp has reached a milestone that no other mobile messaging service has achieved: 400 million monthly active users, with 100 million active users added in the last four months alone. This isn’t a count of people who just registered for WhatsApp – it’s the number of people who are actively using the service every single month.
Whatsapp is a small company, with about 50 employees. Having reached this scale, it must be really something. Jan Koum(co-founder), who pens this blog post on the official site also brings up a couple of stories that Whatsapp has been associated with. A long distance relationship made easy, a Charity that uses it to send daily reports and drum up international recognition and even Doctors in India sending ECG reports and images directly to patients. It’s not surprising to see that Whatsapp is what MMS should have been all along, but with the ubiquity of smartphones, it’s good that we are not relying on the archaic cell infrastructure and just using its pipes to connect to people we care about. We’ll keep seeing where the Whatsapp story goes from here.
Source Whatsapp Blog