WhatsApp building new feature to organise groups for businesses, school

WhatsApp is building a feature to organise separate groups in larger structures that could be used by businesses or schools, said on Thursday the messaging service owned by Meta Platforms.

'Communities' will also contain new tools for admins, including announcement messages that are sent to everyone and control over which groups can be included.

“At the center of every Community on WhatsApp is a description and menu of groups that people can choose to join. This provides a structure and organization to conversations among larger and more complex groups that allow people to focus on what matters to them,” the company said.

“That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organise smaller discussion groups on what matters to them.”.

Communities will be private and messages will be protected with end-to-end encryption. “Close-knit groups — schools, members of a religious congregation, even businesses — very much want and need to be able to have secure and private conversations without WhatsApp monitoring their every word,” it added.

The Meta (formerly Facebook) -owned messaging platform is also going to roll out a slew of new features in the coming weeks for WhatsApp groups before launching Communities. It will introduce one-tap voice calling for up to 32 people in a group, group admins will be able to remove errant or problematic messages from everyone’s chats and emoji reactions like those on Instagram will be added to WhatsApp.

“While other apps are building chats for hundreds of thousands of people, we’re choosing to focus on supporting the groups that are part of our daily lives,” said WhatsApp.

“It’s early days for Communities on WhatsApp and building the new features to support them will be a major focus of ours for the year to come.”