A WhatsApp missing the word - Computer Point

The company just acquired by Facebook CEO promises audio calls by spring. But it has to deal with the price of success: a Saturday Night Fever and questions privacy policy

Rome

– From the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ??the CEO of WhatsApp Jan Koum does a surprising announcement: after upset the lives and budgets of telcos eliminating the earnings billionaires from the SMS, the neo-division of Facebook is preparing to also make their first steps in voice calls. Within a few months, issues of weeks, you can call your friends via WhatsApp and the quality of the service will be first class, says Koum. Although, it is evident, the challenge will be to keep the promises: the popularity obtained after the operation to be $ 19 billion has already caused some problems, and you will make mistakes from now on if you do not want to risk a collapse.

move WhatsApp is certainly surprising: the technical effort to handle calls to over 450 million users, 1 billion is projected that convinced Marc Zuckerberg to pay $ 19 billion to snap up the service , it is certainly very different from that required to complete the current task. It is not a trivial task: Saturday night were able to observe all the difficulties, which lasted about four hours, the server WhatsApp support the applied load users poured into the app, maybe rispolverandola intrigued by the news acquisition arrived in the week. The synergies with Facebook could help to prevent these problems occurring again in the future, but Koum has kept us to say that the path of his company will be clearly separated from that of the blue social network.

Facebook already has a audio-video service for calls between its users, and the territory is already very guarded (think Skype, in turn acquired by Microsoft), but Koum says that “we think we have the best product entry into service: we use the least amount of bandwidth possible, and we have optimized to the utmost. ” In other words, who will try the phone calls will not come back WhatsApp: WhatsApp really want to become an October , an operator that provides its services via the Internet, but to avoid coming in direct contrast with the telco also works with them to arrange special rates to match the most avid smartphone users. In any case, the figure of the marketing of WhatsApp will not change: low profile, low cost, simplicity of use.

The most critical point the finger right on the latter aspect: will not be that WhatsApp has sacrificed the strength of the security and privacy of the service on the altar of simplicity? Canada and the Netherlands have not failed to their voices heard on the use of unconventional directories of service users, some doubt (never entirely dispelled) on the security of the protocol is circulated in the past. In the era of Datagate is not a small matter, a careful scrutiny in terms of the effectiveness of the tools put in place by WhatsApp is not something to be settled in short, and the specific gravity of WhatsApp joined Facebook I will do a special observed for keep safe private conversations inquiring eye of the NSA and other intelligence agencies of government.

Luca Annunziata