You can now share your life openly on Whatsapp.
Whatsapp is known to be the go-to private messaging app for most of us. That’s what Whatsapp envisioned to be 8 years ago—to facilitate a new form of communication that doesn’t require us to pay per message or call.
But, imagine one day you wake up to a whole new Whatsapp that will allow you to scroll through massive chunks of content, just like any other social media platforms. Sounds familiar? Well, this reality is about to unfold faster than you think. And in fact it is going to happen this Friday, 24 Feb.
It’s actually almost about time messaging apps join the social media party. With Wechat having already incorporated social media into private messaging long ago, it is no surprise that Whatsapp is transforming, more obnoxiously than ever, to one that mimics social media.
And in this case, Whatsapp is planning to adopt a heavy content sharing style like that of Snapchat. (Surprised? We think not as Facebook did try to buy Snapchat for $3 billion previously.)
What’s Up, Whatsapp?
Instead of a single-liner status limited to only 140 words, you can now share images and videos for 24 hours as your Whatsapp Status. In other words, it’s going to be exactly like Instagram and Snapchat Stories.
This will be done with the new “built-in” camera feature. Instead of merely sharing photos or videos in your private message chatroom, Whatsapp is essentially allowing you to share snippets of your everyday life to a wider audience at once (a.k.a. more of your friends and family members that you don’t necessary communicate with on Whatsapp)
It’s special feature would probably be their end-to-end encryption. The company recently launched its major security update, bringing two-step log-in verification.
This content-sharing feature might also bring in revenue for Whatsapp as this function would allow businesses to leverage on another potential advertising platform with one of the highest user traffic.
Another Snapcopy
Given its highly similar features, many have criticised their lack of originality. Well, aside from the obvious fact that it is an exact replica of Instagram Story, this “copy Snapchat trend” has been going on for quite some time. Especially after the rise of Instagram Story that had even sparked the anger of Snap Inc’s CEO top-model girlfriend, Miranda Kerr.
However, Mr Randall Sarafa, product manager for Whatsapp, reflected that ever since its creation, Whatsapp and many other tech companies have already been finding ways to promote easier sharing methods for non-text information.
Hence, it is only natural that businesses in the industry caught on with one another, and inject their own flavour to the original idea.
Double trouble for Snapchat?
According to Todayonline, WhatsApp’s audience is far larger than Snapchat’s, which reported 158 million daily users. Amongst the Whatsapp users, the number of photos sent daily has doubled over the years to 3.3 billion with about 760 million videos and 80 million gifs daily. It is only time that Whatsapp incorporated a “Snapchat-like” function to facilitate greater user-experience in the visual communication age.
The new “Whatsapp Status” function will be launched this Friday, 24 February 2017. And we are pretty psyched to see how this Status function is going to look at Whatsapp.