I believe this answers a lot of questions here:
Google CEO reportedly met with Telegram founder Pavel Durov to discuss $1 billion acquisition
http://tech.eu/brief/google-telegram-acquisition-pavel-durov/
The stock market is never absent. Facebook is a public company. Whatsapp became public too via the acquisition. Because they are not talking does not mean that there is no plan. As I said, encryption is a step forward towards a new product strategy. Facebook yesterday suddenly activated Facebook payments for me in messenger. Note the bottom of the screenshot? âEncrypted and privateâ - Payments are also coming to Whatsapp.
Iâve been screaming from the get go that the monetization of WhatsApp will be payments. I was working at MTN the time this deal happened and it literally blew our minds. The reason, the telecoms here have fought number portability with all their might is because your phone number is tagged to your mobile money account which is now their biggest source of revenue. And now WhatsApp is also tagged to that same phone number and ergo mobile money account. They donât even have to bother with advertisers then. A simple âsend moneyâ integration to this WhatsApp contact would kill(not disrupt) so very many industries. Pretty scary when you think of it.
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Itâs albeit a simplistic way of looking at how Facebook will get back itâs invesment though. 
The simple is very powerful. WhatsApp has thrived on simplicity
We donât see the full impact of Facebook payments until we look at their alliance with Shopify. It is bigger than P2P payments. They want to be the interface of everything. Come there and do not go anywhere else. âHuman Attentionâ is the new oil. It has always been more valuable and finite than oil.
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Not if Facebook (the company) continues to turn interesting profits. This quarter alone, they aced where Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter disappointed shareholders.
Facebook as always been about having everyone under their umbrella. Instagram meant people sharing pictures outside Facebook and look what Zuck did without wasting time. Jettisoning Whatsapp would mean 1 billion individuals communicating on a platform that Facebook doesnât own. The shareholders understand this, and definitely wouldnât want that to happen.
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You got a point though. But before the encryption was implemented (recently), they must have obtained enough data to interpolate/extrapolate and still make a behavioral prediction that is pretty good. I still think thereâs more than meets the eye.
What exactly are they extrapolating from your largely misspelled chats though? Also, Whatsapp has always been encrypted. The recent brouhaha was over a move to Moxie Marlinspikeâs Signal protocol
Seems like the acquisition was to âclip their wingsâ and not necessarily derive RoI. If WhatsApp was not acq-hired, it could have slowed down momentum on Facebook shares; who knows, it couldâve been cataclysmic.
It was not about âclipping wingsâ but synergy. The Union was greater than the individuals.
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You should know better. Extrapolation (in this case) is predicting future action based on present known data.
Yes. But it was not enough since the keys were stored in a central server operated by WhatsApp; so there is still a slim chance of interception by a third-party. However, I was referring to the recently announced end-to-end encryption where user device stores the decryption keys.
The only party that could read it in this case is Whatsapp themselves, so Iâm not sure by what you mean by âthird partyâ. Rest assured, no one was reading your messages. Until you have evidence otherwise, we can stop assuming someone was decrypting messages to âextrapolateâ stuff. The ânewâ end to end encryption was already implemented in 2014 by the way, starting with Android clients so even if any conspiracy extrapolation was happening, it stopped being possible less than a year after Facebook purchased them. You should click the link in my post.
Okay. I read the link again. Thanks
You need to stop âextrapolatingâ the word âextrapolateâ; you might lose the x in xolubi (pun intended).
OhâŚcâmon @asemota of course I know that, simply looking to abstract the paying-value-forward nature of the stock market leaving Whatsapp real future and prospects under discussion.
Sending money btw accounts? That didnt work for Google wallet with Gtalk, one may argue Gtalk was never as ubiquitous but the rate of adoption of the peer to peer transfer option relative to any point of their growth was never exciting.
Which is why I think they(FB/We chat etc) may be approaching payment differently from the others(G.wallet); set up features / interface for businesses to organize their customer management on Whatsapp with Business accounts and be able to manage payment, enquires, self-services etc.
C2B transfers is how I believe payment would really take off on chat apps, for peer to peer transfers PayPal already won that one.
Or like @Sherrytums observed- Mobile money, but that is only limited to a few countries in Africa.
@87_chuks Look at this image from Messenger payments and read it carefully, focus on âŚâpay rent or ANYTHING ELSEâ
Even MobileMoney is more than P2P transfers. The largest project I have been involved in at MTN has more payments than P2P transfers.
Facebook wants you to be interface of EVERYTHING and ANYTHING ELSE. The engagement with Shopify was brilliant, then there are their acceptance of all sorts of alternative payment mechanisms. They are sure doing it differently.
The stock market players are concerned about pricing and not actual underlying value really. Capital gains come from arbitrage and not realization of value.
Alas, adoption! How many of the other options are being used?
Personally speaking, FB is trying too hard with payments. For the love of sanity, FB started as a college only offering. You start payments behind a few other folks and youâre already offering for burial settlements - anything else?
Unlike Carl Icahn, there are many who actually care about the underlying value of the company they chose to trade.
For them it is paying for value at the best price.