WhatsApp is testing “Communities”, a new group tool in Peru

WhatsApp continues to ramp up the pace of updates and not lose its lead in the complex world of instant messaging. And yes, it’s hard to understand how an app that was born as a messaging service has now become a platform for transactions and corporate strategies, as well as for connecting people with different interests. Today, Peru is part of a select group of countries that is starting to exclusively test the new feature”Communities”.

Starting this Monday and gradually over the next two weeks, Peruvian users whatsapp will start to see a UI tweak that replaces the camera in the top left corner to make room for “communities”.

” communities from whatsapp They will allow you to better manage who manages many WhatsApp groups.” points out RPP Paloma Sherman, public policy manager for Latin America in whatsapp. “During the pandemic, these real communities, which are often made up of different groups, have seen organic use; which are somehow different from each other, but are included in the same umbrella.

Whatsapp Communities: What is it?

Tool”Communities” will allow administrators of various groups in the application to manage communication more efficiently and purposefully. In the case of organizational structures such as schools, companies, media or clubs, “Communities” allows you to organize people by area and better target their unique messages or interactions.

“Very common is a sports club that has different teams in different sports or is divided into men’s and women’s teams. The leaders of this sports club are also the ones who manage and manage those communications that are often reflected in groups. whatsapp”, Sherman adds.

Under this ideaCommunities” helps administrators do what we organically started doing with whatsapp in recent years ordered in groups. Differences? Communication is made easier because, as organizers, we can send messages to one, two, or more groups at the same time, depending on the topic, without having to copy and paste the message between all of them.

“Maybe it happened to you that you are in many groups and receive duplicate information, or that you run many groups and you had to send information to these groups that are part of your own community above. Maybe you forgot one because you have them all separately. So the “community” will sort it out.” notes the head of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp Communities: Available in Peru

Not surprisingly, WhatsApp is choosing Peru for the first mass trials of Communities. In fact, Meta analyzes a lot of user information on a global level and uses these metrics to determine the level of use of its tools. And in Peru, WhatsApp is used on almost all smartphones connected to the network.

In addition to this indicator, Meta has previously chosen Peru for other projects. A few years ago, before being called Meta, Facebook first launched the Messenger Kids option in our country, a parental control tool in the social network’s messengers.

Years later, the Internet.org program started a pilot program to provide data packages to all operators to view Facebook services for free as a fallback system when using our data top-up.

“We want to make a positive impact on communities. This is very good news for community leaders and for those who are part of these communities: to be able to communicate better at the end of the day, no matter what kind of communities you have, be it a school, a club or a company,” Dove emphasizes.

Whatsapp communities: how it works

In order to access this feature from Peru and other countries included in this pilot plan, we must have the latest version of WhatsApp on each device associated with our account. When you sign in, a new icon will appear in the top left corner to replace the app’s camera.

By clicking on it, it will welcome us to “communities” and from there we can select the groups that will make up this community and add them. If you are a teacher who is in charge of multiple rooms, you can create a community with the name of the school and add groups with the name of the room.

By organizing each community, you will be able to send general messages to all groups or interact with specific groups in that community block. The difference with “groups” is that you don’t have to manually search through a long list of chats for each one. All of them will be centralized and organized.

“Communities create a directory of groups. So, when you enter the conversation list, you enter the community and see the groups that are part of this community. After that, the experience within each group itself is very similar to what it has been until now. mention from whatsapp.

Communities are also available for WhatsApp Business

This new feature is rolling out to two of the three apps that WhatsApp supports for users: WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business (there’s also a third dedicated to the API), both of which will add “communities” to the interface.

This new tool will allow administrators of personal and business accounts to manage conversations between different groups and bring them together on one page.

WhatsApp Communities and Privacy

Another important detail Sherman pointed out is that this inclusion does not in any way change the privacy of the conversation and end-to-end encryption: “If someone joins an already existing community, they will not be able to see the previous conversation due to end-to-end encryption. Only those who participated in the conversation can see its content, and if the new participant has not participated in this conversation, then he will not see this content.

On the other hand, the privacy of personal numbers will also be preserved in this new modality. In this case, WhatsApp recommends that you adjust your privacy settings to hide data from unadded users so that you cannot view your online status, profile picture, or any sensitive data.