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A comment on Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App. Parent comment

Re:Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App by zyb09 on Thursday February 20, 2014 @12:10PM (#7272010)
I agree, this is the real reason WhatsApp took off so quickly. Especially that it automatically uses your phone number as account-id and then goes through your address book to automatically populate your WhatsApp contact list.

No other Instant Messenger did that. It was always: Create account, exchange account-ids, add to contact list. This adds huge amounts of friction for a new service, and WhatsApp sidestepped this completely.

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Re:Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App by michaelbuckbee on Thursday February 20, 2014 @01:33PM (#7272661)
Fairly sure Viber did the same thing.
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Re:Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App by dba7dba on Thursday February 20, 2014 @12:28PM (#7272161)
I use KakaoTalk occasionally and KakaoTalk also does the same thing, use phone # as acct, auto populate contact using address book and also suggests friends that you might want to add.
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