‘Messaging Wars: Vine vs. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat’ – ‘Mashable’

Kurt Wagner says, “It’s been hard to ignore the meteoric rise of the private messaging industry over the past two months.

First came Facebook’s jaw-dropping $16 billion purchase of standalone messaging service WhatsApp in February. Chat app Viber was acquired by Rakuten for $900 million. Then messaging startup Tango raised $280 million in March, a funding round that valued the company at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes.

So it’s no surprise that social media platforms, the ones that view messaging as a supplemental feature, have been busy keeping up“.