Through a press release shared this week, WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Meta, announces the launch of its Channels in more than 150 countries. The large-scale launch of this functionality, already tested for several months in 10 countries, will allow the platform to compete with X (formerly Twitter), but in its own way.
After Threads and its launch with fanfare, Meta continues its offensive against X, in the hope of attracting to its various platforms users tired of the turpitudes of the old blue bird network. We learned this week that WhatsApp is deploying its “Channels” on a much larger scale. This feature allows users to follow accounts that offer a feed of posts. In other words, a kind of news feed made up of encrypted messages, published one after the other, similar to tweets.
So far tested in 10 countries, these Channels will now be offered in more than 150 countries, WhatsApp announced in a press release shared on its blog. Meta is also taking advantage of this international launch to enrich the concept with four features.
WhatsApp Channels are coming almost everywhere… with an enriched concept
Here are the four new features announced by WhatsApp on Channels:
- Improved Directory: You can now find channels to follow automatically filtered based on your country. You can also find new channels, most active channels, and popular channels more easily by their number of followers.
- Reactions: You can react with emojis and see the total number of reactions. Your reactions will not be shown to other followers.
- Modification: admins will soon be able to modify their News for 30 days. After this period, we automatically delete them from our servers.
- Upload: When you upload News to discussions or groups, your messages will include a link to the channel.
True to form, WhatsApp also praises the “private” aspect of its Channels. “ Our goal is to create the most private streaming service available », Underlines the Meta subsidiary. “ Channels are separate from your chats, and other followers can’t see who you choose to follow. We also protect the personal information of channel admins and their followers ”, we read further.
It remains to be seen whether, between the WhatsApp and Threads channels, Meta really has what it takes to overshadow X. During July, a survey suggested, for example, that our readers were not particularly excited about Threads.
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