Well, the folks at Facebook will be celebrating this weekend. The social network’s messaging platform WhatsApp now has 800 million active users every month. If it goes on like this, the service should exceed 1 billion users by the end of the year. Now that’s a lot of chatter.
In a Facebook post on Friday, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that the Facebook-owned service now has 800 million active users every month.
This is the latest milestone for WhatsApp, which lets users send messages to other users of the app for free over the internet. It’s available on just about every mobile platform, including iOS,Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices.
Since it was acquired by Facebook for a hefty $19 billion in a deal that closed back in October, WhatsApp has seen consistent growth. It reached 600 million last August and 700 million in January, only taking another three months to reach 800 million.
At this rate WhatsApp could easily exceed 1 billion monthly active users by the end of the year.
As it stands though, WhatsApp is one of the largest social services around. In February, Twitter reported a user base of288 million active users a month. In December, Instagram reported300 million monthly users while Facebook - which owns Instagram as well as WhatsApp - reported anaverage of 1.39 billion monthly active users.
Despite being the most globally popular messaging app, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg still believes the service has a long way to go before it catches up with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem in terms of business maturity. In his own words:
“What I’d say around messaging is we’re pretty early in that cycle… We are about where Facebook was in around 2006 or 2007, where, at that point, Facebook is really just a consumer product. There were no businesses in the ecosystem.”
WhatsApp recently launched a voice calling feature on Android, with the feature expected to hit iOS and Windows Phone devices in the next few weeks.
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