communities
This new Whatsapp feature finally wants to declutter our chats
The community function is intended to make WhatsApp chats clearer
© WhatsApp / PR
Whatsapp is, of course, one of the most important means of organizing everyday life for most Germans. But the group function in particular quickly becomes confusing. A new feature aims to change that.
One group for the football discussion, one for the parents’ evening and one for the family pictures: Anyone who uses Whatsapp seriously will be part of countless chat groups in no time. And he has to manage the resulting chaos himself. Now the messenger wants to help to keep track of things. And introduces so-called communities.
Whatsapp announces this in its current blog post. Communities are a kind of supergroup. They allow several groups to be combined on one topic. For example, you can combine all parent chats into one class, the various family groups or club or company networks into one community. And so you don’t always have to search individually.
Whatsapp Communities: More overview in the chat
To make the communities easily accessible, they become part of the menu bar at the top (Android) or bottom (iPhone). The symbol is based on the group logo: while two people can be seen there, there are simply three in the communities. If you click on it, an overview of the communities and the three most recent associated group chats appears, as with other chats.
The function should be compatible with existing groups, they can be easily integrated into communities. Administrators of the respective communities also have the option of sending particularly important messages to all members of the communities, i.e. sharing them in all groups included at the same time.
Three other innovations are Whatsapp worth only a subordinate clause. Together with the community update, Messenger is also adding new functions to the other chats. You can now add up to 32 people to a video call at the same time instead of eight. The group size also increases significantly. While the limit was 512 participants so far, the limit has now doubled to 1024. Last but not least, it is now possible to start surveys among users directly in the chat.
Whatsapp focuses on companies
Even if Whatsapp primarily emphasizes private purposes such as the house community or the parent group in its announcement, the other functions show that the messenger should actually be about a completely new customer group – namely companies. While Whatsapp is used in small businesses, larger companies prefer to use specialized programs such as Microsoft Teams. With the new functions, Whatsapp should also slowly become a usable alternative.
Whatsapp also knows that the needs of companies, clubs and family groups differ. In order to adapt the communities to different uses, they are working with 50 organizations from 15 countries, the blog entry announces. It is not revealed exactly what these are. However, one wants to regularly expand and adapt the function based on the feedback from the communities.
Whatsapp Communities: When does it start?
Whatsapp has not revealed exactly when the update will appear on users’ smartphones. No update is available for download yet, but new functions are often simply pushed from the server directly to the smartphone.
Source: Whatsapp