WhatsApp is about to have its 8th birthday and to celebrate this milestone, they are bringing, or rather, reinventing, a new way of letting people know what you’re up to through not just through text but decorated photos and videos. Yes, the status feature will act like what Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories, and Messenger’s your day users have already been enjoying. The advantage that WhatsApp brings to this is that it has end-to-end encryption, just like what you enjoy when you send messages to your contacts and friends.
This updated status feature started testing to beta users last November, but now they will be rolling it out already to all users worldwide. It functions basically like the other features we mentioned earlier, which basically copied itself from Snapchat. You can attach a photo, video, or GIF and add stickers and text and drawings to it then post it as your status. All your contacts that you’ve chosen in your persistent privacy settings will be able to see this. Then after 24 hours, it will disappear.
WhatsApp messages have been enjoying an end-to-end encryption for the past few months, and now this will also be part of the new status updates, so that sharing these photos and videos will be secure as well. You can still share messages the “normal” way through private conversations with your contacts and of course those are encrypted as well.
WhatsApp will turn 8 on February 24 to be exact, and they already have 1.2 billion monthly users. These users send 60 billion messages every day, including 3.3 billion photos, 760 million videos, and 80 million GIFs. Let’s see what this new status feature will do for those numbers.
SOURCE: WhatsApp
