Facebook-owned smartphone messaging service WhatsApp has hit the
billion-user mark, according to the leading social network's chief and
co-founder
Mark Zuckerberg.
"One billion people now use WhatsApp," Zuckerberg said in a post on his Facebook page.
"There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people."
Google's
free email service, Gmail, is the latest of the Internet giant's
offerings to crest the billion-user mark, chief Sundar Pichai said
Monday during an earnings call.
The ranks of people using WhatsApp
have more than doubled since California-based Facebook bought the
service for $19 billion in late 2014, according to Zuckerberg.
"That's
nearly one-in-seven people on Earth who use WhatsApp each month to stay
in touch with their loved ones, their friends and their family," the
WhatsApp team said in a blog post.
After buying WhatsApp, Facebook
made the service completely free. The next step, according to
Zuckerberg, is to make it easier to use the service to communicate with
businesses.
Weaving WhatsApp into exchanges between businesses and customers has the potential to create revenue opportunity for Facebook.
Recent
media reports have indicated that Facebook is working behind the scenes
to integrate WhatsApp more snugly into the world's leading social
network by providing the ability to share information between the
services.
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