Massive increase in Facebook owned Whatsapp

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.