We are extremely resistant to recommending 3rd party apps because not everybody will be open to using them so they by default end up being exclusionary. Whatsap for example is a clever front to better mine your personal information to help advertisers (and other agencies) reach you on facebook.
We want to ensure safe and honest space for sharing and learning.
However there are valuable insights in seeing what is good about such apps – there are a lot of directions we can take this current network in. Right now we are pretty much using the ‘out-of-the-box’ architecture of this forum piece which is just a beginning and it would be great to hear how we can build it out. For example we are looking at how we can better achieve the kind of ‘push notifications’ that you refer to rather than simply having the notifications appear via email…