Facebook-owned
smartphone messaging service WhatsApp has hit the billion-user mark, according to
the leading social network’s chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“One billion
people now use WhatsApp,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page.
“There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people.”
Google’s free email service, Gmail, is the latest of the Internet giant’s
offerings to crest the billion-user mark, chief Sundar Pichai said Monday
during an earnings call.
The
ranks of people using WhatsApp have more than doubled since California-based
Facebook bought the service for $19 billion in late 2014, according to
Zuckerberg. “That’s nearly one-in-seven people on Earth who use WhatsApp each
month to stay in touch with their loved ones, their friends and their family,”
the WhatsApp team said in a blog post.
After
buying WhatsApp, Facebook made the service completely free. The next step,
according to Zuckerberg, is to make it easier to use the service to communicate
with businesses. Recent media reports have indicated that Facebook is working
behind the scenes to integrate WhatsApp more snugly into the world’s leading
social network by providing the ability to share information between the
services.
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