A year ago before Whatsapp was in the US news as a billion dollar aquisition, my co-sister asked me to download the app on my iPhone. Apparently it was a big hit with her parents and their side of the family. They described it as a Venn diagram with multiple circles and how easy it was to communicate through that with wifi without getting charged for texts etc. etc.
Promptly paid a modest $ for the app and downloaded it. Then it got interesting. The phone was buzzing non stop with messages that were more like FB status updates and likes.
In the US the order of priority is Email, Phone call, Text or Phone call, email text depending on who you talk to. The logic being this.. If you want to reach out to someone you can call someone and leave a voicemail. You can also email them if they are at office. However if they are in a meeting and they cannot talk to you and they are using their computer, you can always text them.
In fact over the course of years, we used to text co-workers while on conference calls as a "strategy" of sorts.
Whatsapp somehow disrupted that priority order by treating messages as texts. So there is no separating the wheat from the chaff.
So I dropped off from Whatsapp. Well my father-in-law whose name was actually the group in Whatsapp quit it himself because he realized that the constant ringing was not good for his sleep. Between US, India and Australia, it is always evening somewhere but that disrupts your sleep.
Recently though, Whatsapp became a necessity of sorts, only because the folks we needed to reach were using that instead of Facebook or gmail. The app was put to good use in India, but the minute we came back here, turned it off again.
When you get a ring that is sending you some advertisement or quote from some famous person, even if it is Emeril Lagasse, it can be annoying at 3AM.
Apparently, I have the concept all wrong. One has to treat it like email. Set it to sleep in the night and open it just like FB and respond when you feel like it.
That said, this novice is still figuring it out. I still dont see what all the hoopla is about given we have Facebook already and our internet connection screams and the data plan is good enough to get texts and updates on FB or gmail where we are. Guessing it is a bigger deal in places where internet plans are not that great or data plans are expensive.
Maybe using Whastsapp will bring me into different circles in the Venn diagram!
If you have added me to this thing recently, please bear with me as I figure it out over time...