Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has announced the addition of new features to the popular WhatsApp platforms.
The new function, he claims, will allow people to communicate with intimate friends and acquaintances in diverse communities.
Meanwhile, Meta's CEO claimed that the new features would be gradually given out to the general public over the next months.
In his words, Today we're starting to test a major evolution of WhatsApp that we've been working on: WhatsApp Communities.
"It's been clear for a while that the way we communicate online is changing. 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.
"Our messaging services are built around one-to-one text messaging -- and that will stay the core of what we do. But we've also been working on building out the next generation of private messaging.
With a focus on privacy, safety and security, we've added video chats, voice messages, stories, commerce, payments and more to WhatsApp and Messenger. With today's launch, we're taking this further and enabling people to not only communicate with close friends and contacts but also with all of the different communities in their life.
The new features to groups on WhatsApp, according to Zuckerberg include reactions, large file sharing, and bigger group calls. And because this is WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption and safety features will be built in from the start.
"We're going to start rolling this out slowly, but I expect this to be an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication overall.
In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together.
We'll be building community messaging features for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram as well. I'm excited to see how this progresses as we start testing WhatsApp Communities today and roll it out over the coming months," the Meta CEO stated.
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