Introducing communities …..

Ranked amongst the most popular messaging apps in the world, Meta’s WhatsApp has over 2 billion active users today. The app was launched on November 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. The two buddies created it from the idea of not missing calls (Voice-over-IP-service) while in the gym.

In 2014 Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 Billion. Acton would later leave the company to co-found Signal.

WhatsApp was only available on iOS at the time of launch and on other devices in later versions. Today it has evolved to be secure and fast maintaining its End-to-End encryption feature. Others being:

  • No Ads
  • No Gimmicks
  • No Games

This means that conversations remain between you and your family and friends.

Back to the future.

Despite all those years of existence, the app still boasts these features. Like any other app, WhatsApp has received numerous bump-ups and dark days (we wouldn’t focus on the outages).

2022

image demontrating Back to the future

In a green shirt (quite unusual) but clarified was due to the WhatsApp news, Mark Zuckerberg (Zuck the boss) announced the new features the greatest being communities on WhatsApp. These were the updates that the WhatsApp team had been working on all year.

Communities.

Communities are a great way to organize related groups. This comes with tools to enable Admins to easily broadcast messages to related groups.

“Communities on WhatsApp enable people to bring together separate groups under one umbrella with a structure that works for them. That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them. Communities contain powerful tools for admins, including announcement messages that are sent to everyone and control over which groups can be included. ~ WA.

Ok got the idea? a best-use case could be a boss in charge of many departments like Operations, Financial, etc, and have multiple WhatsApp groups for each. He can create a cluster of groups and post announcements to all groups with one message like “day off tomorrow.”

Features like reactions, large file sharing, polls, 32-person calls, and shareable meeting links for later are also available.

The community feature comes with a brand-new tab on the left.