WhatsApp will upgrade group chats with a Communities feature that will allow us to connect separate group chats into larger structures.
What does this mean for WhatsApp users?
This means that a company director will be able to bring all employees together in one community to share the news with everyone at the same time. Among other things, it will be possible to establish additional groups within it depending on the needs and specific departments within a company in order to further filter the messages.
Such a work structure can be found in the Slack application, as well as in other similar tools used by corporations.
“This way people will be able to receive updates sent to the whole community and easily set up smaller groups to discuss things that are important to them,” explained WhatsApp in their blog.
This feature is designed for people who know each other but need more tools to organise and manage their conversations. WhatsApp is not planning to create a new social network through which people will get to know each other, in fact, it will not allow the possibility of searching or discovering new communities.
Communities will include new tools for administrators – such as messages sent to everyone and control over groups that can be in/out of umbrella groups. Moreover, to protect user privacy, all phone numbers will be hidden from the community and visible only to administrators or small groups.
New types of communication – reactions, large files, and large voice calls
Whether part of the community or not, WhatsApp is working on a number of improvements to enhance group conversations and reduce the overload of new messages.
Reactions to messages, similar to those available on other platforms owned by Meta – Instagram and Facebook Messenger – will soon be available, so that users can quickly express their opinions without flooding the groups with unnecessary messages.
Also, although so far only message senders have been able to permanently delete their message, in the future conversation administrators will also be able to delete anything sent by anyone.
One thing is clear – WhatsApp focuses on cooperation and messaging between as many people as possible, which is corroborated by the announcement that in the future messages will support files up to 2 gigabytes with a possibility of being in a voice call with as many as 32 people at a time.
WhatsApp has started to gradually introduce these changes these days, so check it out – some of them may already be available to you.
Source: WhatsApp
