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Showing posts from February, 2014

Mobile contacts are now the real social network

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This post was also published on TechCrunch. Facebook’s surprising acquisition of WhatsApp signals that it has realized that users’ true social network is the contact list on their smartphones. Mobile contacts are usually limited to people a user knows well and actually communicates with, a veritable treasure trove when compared to the copious list of Facebook friends that many users have accumulated over the years. Adding someone to your phone is more intimate than friending them on Facebook. And messaging someone through their phone number is much more intimate than a Facebook message, something that Mark Zuckerberg himself says is akin to informal e-mail . Facebook had the opportunity to own the social graph for new apps with Facebook Platform, which spawned multiple successful companies such as Pinterest that used the “follow all my Facebook friends” feature to build their own social networks. Threatened by the emerging networks, Facebook decided to clamp down on new “comp