'A major evolution' WhatsApp unveils Communities, a new feature including 32-person video call

Meta Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, November 3, 2022, made this announcement, saying it a “major evolution for WhatsApp”.

He said the new feature offers more extensive and more structured discussion groups on the messaging platform.

According to him, Communities will provide users with the ability to organize and bring related groups together under one umbrella. The members can receive updates sent to the entire community and organise smaller groups to discuss topics that most matter to them.

To use the feature, users are advised to tap on the New Communities” tab at the top of their chats on the app.

Users can start a new Community or join an existing group from a list of available ones. Once a user has joined a Community, they can switch from one available group to the other as they search for information.

Besides Communities, WhatsApp also released more features to “improve the group chat experience”, including in-chat polls, larger file sharing, reactions, groups with up to 1,024 users, and shareable call links.

Meanwhile, as Meta doubled down on its monetisation drive across its family of apps, Zuckerberg had said that JioMart on WhatsApp in India was going to be a big opportunity for the paid messaging market.

During the company’s Q3 earnings call, the CEO said that paid messaging was another opportunity that we were starting to tap into.

“We launched JioMart on WhatsApp in India, and it was our first end-to-end shopping experience that showed the potential for chat-based commerce through messaging,” Zuckerberg told analysts.