WhatsApp is being remodeled in front of our eyes. More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp regularly to text or make phone calls, but it scarcely generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014. That’s because WhatsApp is mostly a personal communications app, and Facebook doesn’t make money from that group chat with your cousins. Haltingly, including by agreeing to buy a customer service start-up on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its trademark playbook to remake WhatsApp into an inescapable way for businesses to interact with us. If Facebook figures it out, WhatsApp could change how we shop and use the internet forever — as the company’s main social network and Instagram did.

Source: New York Times December 01, 2020 17:24 UTC