Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

And India too I think.

I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)

This makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.

Orkut was launched in 2004 too

That's wild, thank you. I could have sworn it launched in 2000 and was very much earlier than Facebook.

Europe's infatuation with WhatsApp is bizarre. The EU is supposedly a bastion of privacy but goes all-in on a proprietary, siloed communication channel. Given their predilection for enforcing standards usage, you'd think there'd be a move for a federated SMS successor that works with IP clients to counter the risk of dependency on an American company with so much power.

Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate

The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.

>Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever.

Right, this explains the history of why Europeans (and others) don't use SMS any more and use chat apps, namely WhatsApp. But still, that was many years ago, and there are many other (and better) chat apps out there now. The EU has been agitating a lot against US tech dominance, but they seem stuck on WhatsApp from Meta; they should have been moving to something else a long time ago.

I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)

In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.

Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.

WhatsApp became popular long before Meta bought it in 2014. Signal and Telegram both came late to the scene, both around the time of the WhatsApp acquisition. Whatsapp was simply in the right place at the right time with little competition, and a combination of network effects and Meta mostly leaving it alone make it hard to get enough traction for anything else

The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

Green bubble / blue bubble social and culture wars are not a thing in Europe.

They're not a thing almost anywhere outside the US (and maybe Canada).

They're not really a thing in the US either, outside of people trying to engagement bait on social media.

Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.

It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.

Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.

I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).

The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.

My pet theory is that it's just because don't have a critical mass of iOS users to make iMessage viable and still wanted features at least half a decade before RCS got to a usable state.

Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.

I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.

That might be more likely now given recent events

This seems like the sort of anecdotal experience the post to which you’re responding is talking about haha

Yep, it is a thing in a handful of Western European countries.