We warned you at the end of January, and soon it will be a reality. WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Meta, has announced a series of new features for its status. The tool, “inspired” by the status of its sister Instagram, has not really stood out to date, being quite minimalist in terms of the features it offers.
The most prominent feature by far “will be quite a talking point”, and that is that the status, in addition to text and images, will now be able to include your voice. The new voice status will allow users to record and share voice messages of up to 30 seconds as status updates.
This new feature, which was in beta last month, will delight those people who want to communicate something to their loved ones, but don’t want to spend a lot of time writing or uploading an image (yes, the same people who send audios that could be published as podcasts on Spotify).
In addition to voice notes, this new batch of WhatsApp updates will include a “private public selector”, a new privacy option for status that will allow you to share certain information of a more private nature with the people you choose.
In addition, we will be able to react to the status with emoticons, in a “similar” way (copy and paste) to Instagram. When we enter the status of a WhatsApp contact, we can slide our finger up and click on one of the eight emoticons that will appear. If you wanted to tell a person that you find their status very funny, you will no longer have to reply.
WhatsApp will also include status rings in profiles when there are new updates. This way, we won’t have to go into the Status section to see the latest from our family and friends, as they will appear in the chat list, group participant lists and contact information.
Last but not least, we will be able to see a preview of the links published in the status. After posting a link in a status, a preview will automatically appear in thumbnail format with the content behind it, giving us a clear idea of what we will find.
This new batch of features comes a few weeks after it became known that WhatsApp is testing the possibility of uploading our photos and images without losing quality (something that will be appreciated by those who share photos with their friends in groups), as well as new shortcuts that will facilitate the task of blocking those contacts we want out of our lives.
