Despite being by far the most used service in the world within its segment, WhatsApp It does not stop introducing new features and possibilities to prevent the competition, led by Telegram, from taking away users. Possibly someone says that WhatsApp is plagiarizing Telegram, and on many occasions that can be considered true.
Apparently some users of the beta branch of WhatsApp for Android and iOS have received a new feature that will allow them to share videos up to sixty seconds longa format that can be reminiscent of TikTok and the shorts from YouTube. There is apparently nothing extraordinary here: users hold down the virtual microphone button, the symbol turns into a camera, and they can then record videos that are shared through conversations.
The intention with these short videos is to create a new message format or what amounts to the same, the videos would be messages that will be sent through the conversationsso, if what we know is confirmed, it would be like a kind of vitaminized voice messages, with the possibilities offered by the images shown by the videos, which opens the door to doing without sound depending on what you want to send.
A characteristic of the alleged messages in video format is that recipients will be able to tell if the message was recently recorded in order to ensure its veracity, so in theory they should be easily differentiated from those that were previously recorded and sent some time later. This is in addition to the end-to-end encryption used by WhatsApp to safeguard user privacy and data.
WhatsApp has announced during the course of this year new features such as channels to follow topics that interest users, screen sharing and usernames. Meta wants users to be able to not just share texts, but messages in many different ways and wants to promote features more related to communities and social networks, many of which were implemented in Telegram a long time ago.
We will see how the messages in short video format of up to seconds go, but at least from the outside it smells a bit like WhatsApp wants to take advantage of the pull that TikTok and the shorts from YouTube.
