Earlier last April, it was heard that WhatsApp is going to bring a feature called ‘channel’, which will allow you to create your own channels alongside personal profiles, groups or communities – just like Telegram. In that case, now means almost two months after the instant messaging platform started rolling out this new feature. Sealing all the earlier speculations, in a recent announcement WhatsApp said that they have created a new tab called ‘Update’ through which channel options can be accessed. And this tab will be separately in the status section But what is this WhatsApp Channel? And what is its effectiveness? Let’s take a look at some of the details.
What is WhatsApp Channel?
WhatsApp Channel is essentially a one-way broadcaster tool for group or community admins to get a unique experience of sharing text, photos, videos, stickers and polls. And ordinary users’ channels will act as searchable directories, where they can easily find updates on topics they like or are interested in. However, messages exchanged between channels will not work under WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption system, all information in a channel will exist for 30 days and then disappear automatically.
Incidentally, in this case, users will be able to join or subscribe to a WhatsApp channel through chat, e-mail or an invite link posted online. The user can also control which channel they want to subscribe to. Also, no one else can see who they have followed or added to their contacts. Meanwhile, channel admins’ phone number and profile photo will not be shown to followers, similarly one follower’s phone number will not be revealed to another. Admins can set the privacy of their follow and channel directory.
According to WhatsApp’s blog post, the payment feature will work in line with this new option – meaning channels will also have WhatsApp Payments. And they think that the future income will be opened through various channels.
These are the new features of WhatsApp currently available in these places
The WhatsApp channels will initially be available in Singapore and Colombia, then gradually spread to other countries around the world, the company said. So we have to wait for some more time to use this in India.
