Facebook Drops Major Cash on WhatsApp

Well this bit of news is huge today in the social media department. Facebook paid $19 billion for the rapidly growing app, WhatsApp. This is more of a move to eliminate competition so I wonder what the future of WhatsApp is to be.

Courtesy of Lobo Studios, Hamburg. (CC)

There are several options here. Facebook could literally fire the entire staff, dissolve the company, and make Whatsapp die. This is obviously least likely.

A more likely option is that Facebook attempts to combine the mobile version of their service with that of WhatsApp's existing platform.

But what will likely happen is that Facebook will take a couple interesting concepts that Whatsapp uses, then ultimately reject the company. The app itself might stay in existence for a short while but I doubt Facebook will put any real work into improving the service when they want to boost their personal brand. Co-branding doesn't really work in the billion dollar businesses.

-by Levi Warner