WhatsApp!!

There are not many technologies that I immediately "get". Even in my more impressionable years, one had to struggle to convince me that a platform was relevant. Take peer-to-peer file-sharing for instance. That band-wagon was jumped on by all my peers worth their salt but I resisted. Many iterations later, we have the torrent sites and god-knows-what out there that enable copyright theft. All fun and games if you do not mind the occasional censure from your local authority or the trojan file embedded onto your system. I also thought Twitter would not gain relevance - good thing I did not bet against it! I resisted Facebook until 2008 and now cannot live a day without it. As for Skype and Firefox, I was an evangelist! Been there, done that and got the t-shirts to prove it but they have rather limped along without fully delivering on the promise to change the game.

But I digress, just the other night I was introduced to WhatsApp which is a free instant messenger for smartphones that is platform-agnostic (works on BB, Android, Nokia Ovi and iPhone). It truly fills the gap that Skype had ambition to, many moons ago. Rather ominous judging from my pop culture IT track record but we are excited and have become an advocate for this app. For crying out loud, it allows you send free text messages, photos, videos (yes videos!), sound recordings, file attachments and a location based geo-tagged map telling the other chat participant exactly where you are. Thankfully the map is off by several hundred metres but that is the subject of another blog post. The downside is that if you do not already have a data plan (what planet are you on) it can be expensive.

Anybody else using WhatsApp?