Popular messaging service WhatsApp announced that they have reached
over 300 million users, making them one of the largest third party
messaging services ever. Whatsapp also announced that they will be
adding voice messaging to the app in a ‘push to talk’ type feature.
WhatsApp is a cross-platform messaging service that allows iPhone,
Android, Blackberry and Windows phone users to send messages to each
other without using their text plans. The service gained popularity a
few years back, as people looked to move away from Blackberry devices
but still wanted a Blackberry messenger-like service. Based on these new
numbers, it doesn’t seem like that popularity is slowing down.
According to cnet.com:
“Watch out for WhatsApp. The mobile messaging smash has grown to a captive audience of more than 300 million people, up from 250 million active users less than two months ago. The 4-year-old service is also expanding in function to include a new type of messaging.
“Today, we’re proud to announce that WhatsApp has surpassed 300
million monthly active users worldwide, a milestone on the road to
WhatsApp becoming the communication network of the 21st century.”
The updated version of WhatsApp should be available within the next
24 hours. Voice messaging was already somewhat possible in previous
versions of the application, but the updated version makes the process
more seamless. As business manager Neeraj Arora told forbes.com:
“Push-to-talk messaging as it’s technically known, was a pet project
of WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who worked closely with the company’s
engineers over the last six months to fine-tune the feature. It will be
pushed out to WhatsApp users across all platforms and devices in the
next 24 hours.
“Certain languages such as Chinese are very difficult to type,” says
Arora. “For some people it’s easier to send a quick voice message… and
it’s more fun and expressive.”
WhatsApp may be making this into a bigger deal than it is, though. As
stated, in previous versions of the application you could send ‘audio
notes,’ they just required a few extra steps. Most 
people
use text to facilitate conversations instead of actively interacting
using speech. But if they decided to use speech, a video/voice calling
feature may have been a better option—like the integrated features of
Google’s messaging app, Hangouts.
people
use text to facilitate conversations instead of actively interacting
using speech. But if they decided to use speech, a video/voice calling
feature may have been a better option—like the integrated features of
Google’s messaging app, Hangouts.
All in all, WhatsApp growing their user base by 50 million in a few
short months is bigger news than a voice message feature, and this is
still a great product worth using.
Check out Whatsapp voice messaging video below and give us your thoughts.
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