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 scandal
If 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 look somewhat different today. Their failure to get hired, however, left the two former Yahoo! employees with enough time on their hands to play around with an idea. And eight years ago, that idea became WhatsApp.
Like most incredibly lucrative inventions, 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 last year it overtook traditional SMS text messaging in popularity and increasingly it’s weaving itself into the fabric of modern life, 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, intimate circles of trust where like-minded people can share stuff that matters to them.
Sometimes it’s things that would be boring to anyone outside the circle, as with the legions of family WhatsApps used to share baby pictures, in-jokes and gently nagging messages from mothers to far-flung offspring at university. For teenagers, they’re places to dissect last Saturday night in excruciatingly minute detail, and develop their own intricate etiquette along the way. (It’s rude to ignore an unfolding group chat, since the app can let the rest of the group know who’s online and if they’ve read a post; but it’s just as rude to bombard the group with endless witterings or prolong the conversation after everyone else clearly wants to stop. The ethics of sneaking off with one member for a private chat behind the group’s back, meanwhile, remain a minefield.) But sometimes what’s shared is anything but dull.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian.
