Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of new features for its subsidiary platform WhatsApp. The feature dubbed “Communities” comes with polls, expanded room for video calls and chats.
Meta said the Communities was introduced earlier this year and has been in testing since. The company added that it has been working with over 50 organizations in 15 countries to build the Communities.
“Today we’re launching Communities on WhatsApp,” Zuckerberg said. “It makes groups better by enabling sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels, and more.”
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“We’re also rolling out polls and 32-person video calling too. All secured by end-to-end encryption so your messages stay private.”
The company said “there is more we plan to build and we’ll keep adding features over the coming months.”
The plan is to expand the messaging app’s features as part of Meta’s efforts to widen the scope of its social media products and services in the face of growing competition.
How it works
The Communities tool is designed to organize multiple group chats into one place. This enables a school, neighborhood or office to be joined together with a number of different chats. Administrators can then send messages to everyone in that community.
It will appear as a tab at the bottom of the app. From there, users can start a new community, or join existing ones.
WhatsApp said that this new feature will be available to everyone over the next few months. The Independent quoted the company saying that it had focused on “privacy and security” with the new feature, and said that it offered safety that was not “not found anywhere else”.
“The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages – and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption,” it said, seemingly referring to alternatives such as Discord and Slack.
Another significant part of the feature is the poll. Users will be allowed to create and take part in polls with their chats. Also, the group video calling has now been expanded to support up to 32 participants.
In addition, the number of users in a group has been increased from a maximum of 512 to 1,024, doubling the group’s size in a potential bid to stand up to rival Telegram which allows a maximum of 200,000 users per a group.
“With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else,” WhatsApp said in a blog post announcing the rollout.
“The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages – and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption.
“Once you’re in a community, you can easily switch between available groups to get the information you need, when you need it, and admins can send important updates to everyone in the Community.”