Plenty have been wondering what's next for WhatsApp after the popular messaging service was purchased by Facebook for $16 billion last week, and now we have the answer: voice calls. According to TechCrunch, WhatsApp announced during a Mobile World Congress event today that it would be adding voice services to iOS and Android during the second quarter of the year. The feature will reportedly head to Nokia devices and BlackBerrys sometime after that.
WhatsApp also provided an update on its active user count: it now has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily users, according to TechCrunch. That's 15 million more monthly users than Facebook detailed just last week when reporting the purchase. WhatsApp has already risen to an impressive popularity on basic messaging features alone, and the addition of voice calls should only enhance that further when they begin to roll out later this year. The app has done well by offering inexpensive messaging services where messaging is traditionally quite expensive, and doing the same for phone calls would likely be a boon for growth. WhatsApp is reportedly optimizing the amount of data its voice calls use, which should help in keeping users' expenses down as well.
The Guardian reports that WhatsApp's voice calling features will be free, though it's possible that this may only be for a limited time. Messaging is initially free within the app, but eventually requires a $0.99 per year subscription. It's likely that voice services will fall under this too, while breaking it out as a second offering could even provide an additional revenue stream. Though WhatsApp has never appeared eager to bother users with added costs like that on the path to big profits, it'll be interesting to see if that changes as a public company underneath Facebook.
This morning, Facebook is announcing a new standalone iPhone app called Paper. Contrary to earlier rumors, it's much more than just a news-reading app — it's a complete reimagining of Facebook itself. Once you've used it, you may never want to open the standard Facebook app again. It may not replicated every feature of Facebook's main app, but it does fulfill the majority of people's needs. Simply put, it's much, much better.
Paper takes the standard Facebook News Feed and recreates it as an immersive, horizontally scrolling set of screens. It also provides a new way to post to Facebook (and Paper) with an elegant WYSIWYG editor that borrows the styling of Medium's and Svbltle's blogging systems. Finally, yes, it's a news-reading app that owes some of its looks to Flipboard. It will be available for the iPhone in the US (and only the iPhone in the US) on February 3rd. It's also ad-free, at least for now.
That's all more than we were expecting when we sat down with product designer Mike Matas and product manager Michael Reckhow. Neither would quite take the bait when asked whether this should serve as a replacement for the original Facebook app (or, as I put it during our interview, a virtual indictment). Reckhow says that there are "tools that were out there for sharing high-quality stuff and also the tools where you could reach an audience," but that too often they aren't the same thing. "We felt you shouldn't have to choose between one or the other," he says.
Paper cuts away virtually all buttons and other UI elements to make every status update, photo, and news story appear full-screen. To get around, you will need to learn a basic set of gestures, but the app will gently remind you what they are if it thinks you're stuck. Wide photos pan as you tilt the phone (the team cheekily calls it the "Ken turns" effect), UI elements often just fade away, and news stories are presented in Twitter-esque cards.
The lack of chrome to help place you in the app and tell you how to navigate can be a little disorienting. On the bright side, the UI is fast and fluid, thanks to the nine months the team has spent working on the app. Loren Brichter, the creator of Letterpress and Tweetie, also chipped in on the coding. The result is an app that shares a family resemblance to Facebook Home on Android, but is much faster and more full-featured.
Each section in Paper has a main screen with a cover photo and a list of small cards at the bottom. You can scroll through or drill into the cards, at which point you'll be swiping through one card at a time. Matas hopes that you'll flip through slowly. "You really want people to spend a little bit of time with it and appreciate that content," Matas says, "almost like when you go to a museum and you spend a little bit of time with each thing."
If you aren't put off by the idea of considering a photo of your friend's dog an art piece, you might call it a lean-back experience (albeit on a tiny screen). As a UI philosophy, this stands in direct opposition to the high-volume, high-noise vertical feeds we're used to on Twitter and Facebook. It definitely means it will take longer to grind through content like you can on Twitter — but for Facebook, that's exactly the point. If, like me, you're a news addict and an information fiend, Paper may be a little too relaxed for you.
The interface for news reading is exactly the same, with the exception that links are automatically turned into small, Twitter-esque media cards with branding from the publication. Swiping up to read the full story takes you to the source site — there's no offline mode like you might find in a more full featured news app. You also can't add any site you want, as with a traditional RSS reader. Instead, Facebook has hired a team of content curators to pick stories for you in one of a dozen or so categories ranging from basic news to cute animals.
You can post to Paper (and thus Facebook) in a new kind of compose screen. It shows you exactly what the final post will look like, and Reckhow isn't shy about his hope that people will think of Paper as a new kind of thing — even though the plumbing underneath is still Facebook. "Think about when Instagram came out and you now had this new way to share," he says. Facebook’s ambition with Paper is to have it become its own thing, not just a different way of accessing Facebook. Matas goes so far as to say that "it’s a publishing tool, a way of publishing great content, and a way of viewing great content."
Paper is the first product to come out of Facebook Creative Labs, a unit within the company tasked to "innovate and build new things," as Reckhow puts it. That's likely a sign that Paper will be just one of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called "new and engaging types of mobile experiences" on yesterday’s earnings call. Since its embarrassing Snapchat clone called Poke failed, Facebook seems closer to figuring out the right formula for its single-use apps. Facebook knows that mobile users are gravitating towards such apps, and it intends to create more of them.
That’s probably a good thing, and perhaps a necessary one. From a user's perspective, Facebook’s current app is beset by dozens of options, nooks, crannies, and features that most people don’t really use. The recent "tab-centric" redesign helped simplify things, but it wasn’t radical change. Facebook has a billion users, and so any alterations it wants to make to its core app need to be tested — extensively. That kind of testing can get in the way of creative design. "You can’t be innovative if you’re encumbered by worrying if you’re going to disrupt what hundreds of millions or a billion people are doing," Reckhow says.
The team wanted "to have the creative freedom to go outside of what we’ve done and not worry about if it’s going to impact metrics [on] day one." For Reckhow, Matas, and the rest of the team, Paper is less a replacement for Facebook’s app than a chance for the company to try out something very different from what it’s done before — and get another icon on your iPhone’s home screen in the process.
If Paper does score a slot on your main home screen, another app will probably have to be buried away somewhere else. For a lot of people, Facebook itself will be a prime candidate.
While the NSA has been busy scouring the Angry Birds leaderboards, newly leaked documents report that its British counterpart -- the GCHQ -- has been monitoring the flow of social media in real-time. The General Communications Headquarters can apparently keep track of YouTube traffic, which links are liked on Facebook and even which Blogger or Blogspot pages are visited. This all comes viadocuments taken by Edward Snowden that were obtained by NBC News. NBC's sources also say that the British spies have been able to physically tap the lines carrying global web traffic to extract key data about specific users as well. This initiative, called Squeaky Dolphin, intends to put broad data trends into context with world events and give the intelligence community a heads up for future anti-government happenings -- not for spying on a person-by-person level. What's more, the GCHQ reportedly shares this information with the US.
The GCHQ has issued a statement claiming that all of its work is carried out within the limits of the law, while the NSA says that it's only interested in the communication activities of valid foreign intelligence targets. For their part, Google and Facebook say that the spying on unencrypted information was done with out their respective knowledge, and neither company had given the UK government permission to access the data -- something we've heard before.
