When it comes to Facebook, the biggest social media platform in the world, there is little to none to write home about when talking about originality. You only need to look at the features it has copied and then pasted from Snapchat to its social networking platforms such as Instagram and Messenger.
Well, the company has done it again, copy stuff off a competitor and paste it onto its own platform, and this time it has copied Telegram’s feature and pasted it onto WhatsApp. The instant messaging app has just received an update that gives it features a replica of the Telegram’s channels. Where the group admin gets to send one-way messages to the group.
As you might already know, Telegram channels are quite popular for setting up broadcast news feed. Where members who have signed up for the channel simply gets alerts and don’t really get to interact with the message other than click any links therein.
Telegram channels are popular with news agencies, schools, companies, public interest groups and any forum where the admin simply wants to disseminate the information. In a way, WhatsApp group works the same, except each member gets to interact with the information sent by the group admin.
For the WhatsApp Group, all members of a particular group get to interact with any message sent, and any member can also send the message. Things can easily get confusing if after one message has been sent out into the group, everyone jumps in with a comment and reply for that particular message.
With this latest update, group admin can simply broadcast the message to the group, and there will be no follow up replies to the message. It will go a long way to making the message dissemination board tidy and clear of clutter.
“One way people use groups is to receive important announcements and information, including parents and teachers at schools, community centers, and non-profit organizations. We’ve introduces this new setting so admins can have better tools for these use cases,” wrote WhatsApp in a blog post.
The fact that WhatsApp requires you to use your phone number to join a group makes it a big challenge for users who don’t like sharing out their numbers. Telegram found a leeway on this concern by introducing usernames, but if you join a group on WhatsApp. Any other users in that group can look up your number.