Facebook owned company Whatsapp has joined the bandwagon in featuring short captures not dissimilar to the feature originally brought to us by Snapchat.
Whatsapp’s update will allow users to post photos, videos, and GIF’s as status updates, which all disappear after 24 hours. After uploading their photo, users get the option to draw, decorate, and write on their statuses. Once posted, it appears on the status tab, where the users’ contacts get to see it for a day and even reply to the statuses through direct messages. Like their messages, these video status updates are also end-to-end encrypted – meaning that only the sender and the receiver will be able to read the messages.
This update wasn’t such a big surprise though, as Whatsapp only joined the rest of the apps owned by its parent company Facebook – the fourth, to be exact, after Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook all rolled out exactly the same update a few months ago. Whatsapp is the second to be globally released, as the update on Messenger and Facebook is still being tested.
On their blog post, Whatsapp exclaimed that this new update is in celebration of their eighth year anniversary on February 24th, when they revealed the very first version of Whatsapp when it was still only being used for status-sharing. This was months before the messaging function was added, FYI.
“Even after we added messaging in the summer of 2009, we kept the basic “text only” status functionality in WhatsApp. Every year, when Brian and I would plan projects to work on, we always talked about improving and evolving this original “text only” status feature,” said Whatsapp CEO Jan Koum.
One would have to wonder if these updates could be part of Facebook’s strategy to hinder Snapchat growth as they release their first public offering March 2nd. In 2012 Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel disclosed an e-mail sent by Zuckerberg himself who wrote he was a ‘big fan’. Not long after Zuckerberg apparently offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion, to which Spiegel said, ‘No’. Read about the debacle here on Business Insider. Is this Facebook’s way of saying, ‘I can, and I will’?
