I’ve been asking myself the big question: “Why did FB buy What’sApp for $19 billion?”
I know I am late to the party. But surely this puzzle is still a puzzle even if the buzz(le) has moved on.
For me, there are four answers.
1) Facebook was trying to stay in touch with its early adopters, specifically young people who are now migrating away from Facebook at speed. Early adopters are early warning. Where they go, the world will follow.
2) Facebook was attempting to disrupt a disrupter. Mark Zuckerberg has read his Clay Christensen. He doesn’t want to suffer the fate of Friendster. WhatsApp looked like the future. So he bought it.
3) The third answer has to do with the power of photos. Whatsapp users send 600 million photos every day. (http://news.yahoo.com/
4) The fourth answer turns on the mysterious properties of the photograph. (This is a topic dear to my heart. I did research for Kodak in the US, Europe and Asia.)
We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world. But this is only the necessary condition of their significance. The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online. We mint them. We trade them. We accumulate them. We treasure them.
Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.” They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks. We gift people with photos. They reciprocate. Hey, presto, a social world emerges.
Collectively, photos create a currency exchange. They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships. Want to know where networks are going? See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department. Photos are in constant flight. They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.
Why did Zuckerberg pay $19 billion for Whatsapp? He was following the photos, that secret ingredient of the internet economy.