WhatsApp overtook Twitter when you were busy tweeting!

BANGALORE, INDIA: In a silent rise, WhatsApp has overtaken Twitter. That is the claim by WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, who has said that the firm's engagement currently exceeds that of Twitter's 200 million active monthly users, according to a report in Apple Insider quoting AllThingsD.

He goes on to say that the statistics had to be broken down into incoming and outgoing messages, as users can send the same message to five different people in a group chat session. Overall, WhatsApp sees about 8 billion incoming and 12 billion outgoing messages per day.

Twitter, the SMS of the internet, was launched by Jack Dorsey in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

On the other hand, WhatsApp Messenger, a proprietary, cross-platform instant messaging application for smartphones, handled ten billion messages (Wikipedia) per day as of August 2012. According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."

Early this month, there were rumours that Google was acquiring WhatsApp for $1 billion. In December 2012, WhatsApp faced similar buyout rumours from Facebook. But they were eventually put to rest.