Meta’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg, has added new and exciting features to its messaging platform WhatsApp.
The move comes after Facebook announced changes to its terms of use and service, allowing access to user information.
The new feature, dubbed Communities, allows users to more structured discussion groups on the messaging platform.
WhatsApp group communication
Communities will allow users to organise and bring related groups together under one umbrella.
The members can receive updates sent to the entire community and organise smaller groups to discuss topics that most matter to them.
Announcing the new feature on Instagram, Zuckerberg said that this is a major evolution for WhatsApp, and it’s something he’s been focused on for the last year.
With Communities, admins will now have the tools to organise conversations with one umbrella. I believe that close-knit communities need private and secure ways of connecting amongst themselves. And with these additional features, WhatsApp is more private and secure than our competitors.
I’m excited more people will get to use Communities starting today.
What you can do on WhatsApp Communities
WhatsApp has also built many new features to improve the group chat experience on the Communities feature.
These include;
- Like emoji reactions
- Larger file sharing of up to 2GB
- Conduct in-chat polls
- Establish a 32-person call
- Manage groups with up to 1024 users.
- Shareable call links to set up a group call for later
To use the feature, users are advised to tap on the New Communities” tab at the top of their chats on the app.
Users can start a new Community or join an existing group from a list of available ones.
Once a user has joined a Community, they can switch from one available group to the other as they search for information.
WhatsApp systems go down
This followed a recent blow to users when the platforms went down across the world.
Millions of WhatsApp users complained that they could not send or receive messages on the chat platform.
Messages sent to groups remained hanging, while those sent to individuals only showed a single tick.
Many who mistook the WhatsApp outage for issues with their internet rushed to other social media platforms, mainly Twitter, to confirm.
