Facebook seems totally obsessed with the Snapchat Stories feature as the social media giant is not leaving any opportunity to integrate the feature into its services. After Facebook-owned Instagram almost took over the 24-hour photo/video story option from Snapchat and absolutely nailed it, it is now WhatsApp's turn for a cheesy upgrade.
Banking on the increasing trend of stories, WhatsApp is currently working on a cool new feature, which will allow users to upload pictures and videos as their status messages.
Remember the time when WhatsApp first rolled out and users actually spent time to decide what message to be put up on the messaging platform and actually cared to go and check others' WhatsApp status messages as well. But now honestly, nobody cares to check others' or even their own status updates on WhatsApp.
For instance, I don't even remember sometimes what is my status and when was the last time I put an effort to change it. But users are pretty much engrossed when it comes to Instagram or Snapchat stories. They generously go and check them on regular intervals.
Facebook is definitely cashing-in this behavioral pattern of the users. However, the feature will only be available for the iOS users initially, allowing them to put up stories as their WhatsApp status and similar to Snapchat, those stories will only remain there till 24 hours from being uploaded and after that they will disappear on their own.
WABetaInfo shared a post regarding this piece of information wherein it posted a screenshot of this upcoming feature on iOS. According to the Twitter post, the Story status feature has been updated in WhatsApp beta for iOS 2.17.4+, and it comes with its own privacy settings. Additionally, considering that the feature has made it to the beta version, it could surely be part of the main version.
Status introduction text updated in WhatsApp beta for iOS 2.17.4+. pic.twitter.com/NdtoN0rfPv— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) February 12, 2017
Additionally, WhatsApp is also working on another feature, which will allow users to send their live location in group chats.
The platform is reportedly being tested for options to edit and recall messages, which have been sent but not read by the recipient. The revoke feature was first introduced on the WhatsApp beta app for iOS, but it still hasn't made it to the official app.
So, it definitely seems like WhatsApp has a lot of new and exciting offerings in its kitty, waiting to be rolled out.
Besides these upcoming features, WhatsApp has also rolled out quite a few updates to its app recently. The instant messaging feature now brings an extra layer of security to the app with a two-step verification process.
Two-step verification is one of the most widely used and effective security measures and it has been adopted by Twitter, Instagram, Apple, LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft, just to name a few. This feature basically adds an additional layer of authentication before giving one access to their account.
While WhatsApp was quick to adopt an end-to-end encryption for protecting its messages, it has been atypically slow to adopt two-step verification.
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