Sun 17 April 2022:
WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta Platforms, is exploring a new feature called Communities to organize groups in broader structures that may be used by companies or schools.
The tool would bring together groups of up to 256 individuals under larger umbrellas, allowing administrators to send alerts to tens of thousands of people.
Other messaging apps, such as Telegram, which was frequently used for communication during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and other private messaging services, such as iMessage or Sign, could be challenged by communities.
“Most of us use social networks and feeds to discover interesting content and stay updated. But for a deeper level of interaction, messaging has become the centre of our digital lives. It’s more intimate and private, and with encryption it’s more secure too”.
The messaging service, which is end-to-end encrypted and has about 2 billion users, said the Communities feature would also be end-to-end encrypted.
“This is really oriented at the communities you’re already a part of in your life that are doing private communication,” Whatsapp head Will Cathcart said in an interview with Reuters, citing Salesforce-owned Slack or Microsoft Teams as comparable types of communication.
Today we’re very excited to share our vision for a feature we’re calling WhatsApp Communities. This is new functionality we’re building to support the many organizations that use WhatsApp to communicate in a private and secure way. pic.twitter.com/LxEccdgJq8
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) April 14, 2022
He said there were no current plans to charge for the new feature, which is being beta tested with a small number of global communities, but did not rule out offering “premium features to enterprise” in the future.
WhatsApp said there would also be changes to its Groups feature before the launch of Communities.
It said it was adding the ability for group administrators to delete problematic messages from everyone’s chat and admins could remove people from an entire Community group, while users will have the ability to silently leave a group, without everyone else being notified of their exit.
Groups will also get voice chats for up to 32 people at once.
Communities will also have features for groups, including emoji reactions, file sharing and larger voice calls.
Zuckerberg said that Communities would be rolled out over the coming months.
He said Meta would be building community messaging features for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.
Meta also plans to roll out end-to-end encryption across the other messaging services on its apps as part of its ongoing, declared pivot towards privacy.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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