The original social network

When Facebook bought WhatsApp, I couldn't help trying to recollect how I first started using the app and how it had surged out ahead of many of its competitors. I have an entire folder of just over a dozen chat apps on my phone, but I don't recall WhatsApp being the first of them I tried, or even the most beautifully designed. When I went searching for a free alternative to SMS, I recall trying to get folks on Textie, GroupMe, or TextPlus, among others, back in the day. Was WhatsApp the first mover? I don't recall that it was. Later, I joined WeChat, KakaoTalk, and Line to stay in touch with friends in Asia, and these were not just more beautiful in design but more sophisticated platforms than WhatsApp.

So how did WhatsApp break out? I don't know for sure, but I have a theory about one contributing factor.

While many have observed that the address book on your phone is a key social platform in itself, especially since apps can get access to it on iOS and Android phones, the phone number rather than just email address is a particularly unique slice of the contact book, the key of a social platform in and of itself, albeit the social network of a bygone generation.

Because WhatsApp uses your phone number as its user key, it can't be used across your devices. I can only use it on my phone. No tablet or desktop access. But what they lose in footprint across your devices they gained in ease of setup and speed of assembling a very high signal social graph. Instead of having to pick a username and password and remember those, all you had to do was enter your phone number and then wait for a text message to confirm that phone number belonged to you. Then you granted access to your phone's contact book and WhatsApp was off and running to create the largest possible copy of your social graph using phone numbers as the key for each user.

It just so happens that the people you have phone numbers for, the social graph of the previous generation, was and still might be perhaps the best proxy of the graph of people you are closest to. It's an even more intimate graph, in many ways, than your Facebook friends list, mine of which is bloated due to the generational norm of friending freely. The phone number is a holdover from an age when a phone call was an exciting thing to receive, not an annoyance as it is today, in this age of asynchronous communications, all that texting, emoji, and stickers.

Since most people tend to have phone numbers only for people who live in the same country, international calls being a rare occurrence given their high cost and the availability of other ways to reach people overseas now, WhatsApp likely grabbed quick local footholds and spread out within countries. 

I've written before about how messaging doesn't have to be a winner-take-all space because of low switching costs. However, that doesn't mean there aren't network effects to messaging that allow one service to seize a lot of share in a local market, like WeChat in China or KakaoTalk in Korea or Line in Japan. WhatsApp has enormous share in Latin America, certain European countries, and Hong Kong (since many users are like me and use multiple chat apps, share of market of all messaging apps can add up to more than 100%).

More importantly, the ease of setup of using a phone number shouldn't be underestimated. TextPlus and GroupMe required a username and password, a more painful way of setting up one's account, especially on a phone. As way of research I went back and relaunched both of those apps for the first time in ages, and I got stuck on the login screen. What was my password for these services? I couldn't remember and couldn't be bothered to recover them. It's painful enough on a web page to try and recover one's password, it's even more so on the phone where password managers can't enter a password for you in another app.

It's not just painful remembering passwords on the phone, it's painful thinking of one. I've been trained, given all the horror stories of accounts being hacked, into letting my password manager think of some unique, long, and random password for every service that requires one. But that means they're no longer ones I can commit to memory. Given we live in the age of the smartphone, having a quick text sent to your phone with a short code and then keying that into an app to complete account setup is really quite painless as an alternative. Less secure? Probably, but most users discount that heavily.

Given the sheer volume of people going through setup, tiny edges in setup can have a multiplying effect that snowballs.

Someday when don't even have phone numbers anymore, when we just communicate via VOIP, the window for capitalizing on the the graph of people connected by phone numbers will close. In a crowded messaging space, at a time when many people were searching for an alternative to SMS, which was ripe for disruption given its criminal markup, the phone number may have been rocket fuel for WhatsApp's growth.

It's a theory, at least. I'd be curious to hear from others who were following the messaging space more closely in those days.

[UPDATE: Ben Thompson points out that WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk all also use phone number as the primary method for creating an account, just like WhatsApp. I should have been clearer in my post above that I thought WhatsApp's simpler setup was only an advantage versus chat apps like TextPlus and GroupMe which did not have an option to sign up using a phone number. In Asia, many apps offer sign up through phone number, not just chat apps. It's just more of a convention in Asia.

This may be one reason WhatsApp did not come to seize dominant market share in some of the key Asian markets like China (WeChat), Japan (Line), and South Korea (KakaoTalk). Another is that WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk are more sophisticated platforms for which chat is just one piece of the offering. They are also platforms for commerce, gaming, and virtual goods like stickers, none of which WhatsApp offer.]

Interesting facts about airlines

This comes from a site called Viral Quake, so I suspect it has been laboratory engineered for maximum virality. Take it with a few grains of salt. Still, many of these amused me.

2 pilots are served different meals and cannot share, this is done in case of food poisoning.

...

Arm rests – aisle and window seat: Run your hand along the underside of the armrest, just shy of the joint you’ll feel a button. Push it, and it will lift up. Adds a ton of room to the window seat and makes getting out of the aisle a helluva lot easier.

...

Do not EVER drink water on an aircraft that did not come from a bottle. Don’t even TOUCH IT. The reason being the ports to purge lavatory shit and refill the aircraft with potable water are within feet from each other and sometimes serviced all at once by the same guy. Not always, but if you’re not on the ramp watching, you’ll never know.

...

Lock your bags, carry-on bags included.

Look online or in a travel store for TSA-approved locks. The TSA has keys to open those locks in case they need to further inspect them (and hopefully not steal from them). And most people don’t think to lock their carry-on, but especially now with load factors very high, more and more people are having to gate check bags. Once you drop your bag at the end of the jetway for gate-checking, anyone from a fellow passenger, to a gate agent, to a ramp agent has access to your bag.

...

The majority of domestic flights have human remains or organs on them. I work below wing as a baggage handler. Watch out the window for long boxes that say, “Head” at one end… Oh, and I can fit 150 bags in bin 3 of a Boeing 737-300.

Borgen on DVD

In recent years, the most critically acclaimed TV show that isn't really readily available to watch in the U.S. has been Borgen, the Danish political drama.

While the distribution problem hasn't been fully solved, there is a partial solution. Seasons one, two, and three are now available on DVD in North America at Amazon. Here's hoping it gets non-hardware-based distribution in the not-so-distant future; the DVD release indicates that the rights have at least been partially cleared for North America. 

[Of course, the subtext of piracy pervades all discussion of video content and its accessibility. I personally am not an advocate of the argument that if it's available for free via piracy and that's the only way you can get it that that's a license to just grab it, but that's a debate for another day.]

Strategy guide to life

Life begins when you’re assigned a random character and circumstances:

The first 15 years or so of life are just tutorial missions, which suck. There’s no way to skip these.

Young adult stage

As a young player, you’ll have lots of time and energy, but almost no experience. You’ll find most things – like the best jobs, possessions and partners – are locked until you get some.

This is the time to level up your skills quickly. You will never have so much time and energy again.

Now that you’re playing properly, your top priority is to assign your time as well as possible.
 

Missed this when it first came out: Life is a game, this is your strategy guide. Brilliant.

Kids still fat

Results of a recent study seemed to indicate a huge drop in obesity among kids, but only in the 2 to 5 year old band. This generated much puzzlement: what would cause just children in that age range to be less obese?

It turns out, according to several who've analyzed the study and the data, the news might just be a lot of statistical noise and fury, signifying not a whole lot. Emily Oster at the new FiveThirtyEight:

If you look at each age group separately, you’re likely to find large changes in some of them. That’s because as you select smaller and smaller groups within a data set, your problem with noise worsens. For example, say you survey 81 people who are 34 years old in 2003, and 85 people age 34 in 2011. What if you just happen to pick a particularly obese group in 2003 and a thinner group in 2011? With just 80-some people, it’s easy to see how this could happen, and yet you might inappropriately conclude that 34-year-olds in the broader U.S. population have become less obese.

One way to prevent yourself from drawing this erroneous conclusion is to apply a more rigorous t-test to the data, one that takes into account the fact that you looked at many subsets. In the JAMA paper, the authors did not do this. They tested for statistical differences within their smaller age groups, but interpreted their p-values relative to the standard significance level of .05. In the case of the 2- to 5-year-olds, the authors reported a p-value of .03. If this were an analysis of the overall NHANES, that p-value should be taken to indicate a significant change. But since the authors are slicing the data and doing multiple tests — they consider at least six different age groups — the statistics need to be adjusted to account for that. With that adjustment, they’d need a p-value of less than .008 to conclude an effect is significant.
 

Kevin Drum:

To recap: the CDC study was small and had large error bars; other, larger studies find only slight drops in obesity; and there's no indication of any behavioral changes that might have produced a dramatic weight loss. I'd add to that the fact that the CDC data showed no correlation between lower weight at ages 2-5 and lower weight a few years later at ages 6-11.

Bottom line: I hate to be such a buzzkill, but the CDC result seems highly likely to be nothing more than statistical noise. Childhood obesity has barely budged in the last decade.