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Yes, mobile messaging relies on Hadoop

By Sachin Ghai
Mobile messaging apps are the talk of the town after acquisition of Whatsapp by Facebook for a mind boggling figure. It is pretty much in time to take a look at the data infrastructure of the messaging apps. With an aim to explore how much of Hadoop is being used in the messaging world, a few checks were done and certain interesting observations came forward.

First a look at major mobile messaging apps.
While Whatsapp is all too popular now, it has its major user base of 450 million+ users in USA, Europe, Latin America and India. Towards, the oriental half of Asia, there are other dominant players who have spread their reach across the globe. These include QQ and WeChat(from Tencent, China) with an estimated user base of 1 billion; Line(of formerly NHN Corp, Japan) with an estimated user base of 350 million; Kakao Talk (originating from Korea) with an estimated user base of 100 million. Towards the other half of the world in America, SnapChat, Kik, GroupMe, Viber and age old Skype are quite popular. And, not to forget, Facebook also has a Messenger offering.

A look at the Hadoop skilled staff on LinkedIn profiles and Apache Software foundation contributors revealed some interesting comparisons:
- Facebook, the parent company of Facebook messenger is one of the biggest proponents of Hadoop. However, WhatsApp does not seem to think the same way in terms of Hadoop adoption.
- Tencent, the Chinese parent company of QQ & WeChat has a huge concentration of Hadoop skills. Tencent though has bigger interests in internet and communication industry besides messaging.
- Even Skype (now Microsoft company) has been using Hadoop.
- Viber is a big user of NoSQL products like Couchbase and has been using HDFS and other associated ecosystem products.
- Line Corporation(formerly NHN) has for long been a user of Hadoop and was one of main patrons of Apache Hama.
- Kakao and Line have contributors on Apache Tajo project.
 

To understand a sample use case of Hadoop ecosystem involvement, take a look below at a slide deck telling about Line's HBase initiatives.

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Comments

  1. usman khatriJune 23, 2014 at 1:41 AM

    It is pretty much in time to take a look at the data infrastructure of the messaging apps.call logging software

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kurt WillsonSeptember 2, 2015 at 8:05 AM

    Interesting article, yet there are cell phone spy apps which are able to track every messaging app. So where is a security?

    ReplyDelete

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