Between Facebook status updates, Snapchat, and Instagram Stories and good old-fashioned texting, your friends already have ample ways to find out what you're up to. Now there's yet another way to share what you're doing with people you know: WhatsApp Status.
Launched on Monday, the feature lets you share photos, videos, and GIFs with all your contacts at once. From the recently redesigned WhatsApp camera app, you can personalize media with emoji, text, and drawings.
When you open the new Status tab, you'll see updates from people in your WhatsApp address book. Like on rival platforms, these updates will expire after 24 hours. You can control who sees what you share, and mute or unmute contacts at any time. After viewing someone's status, you can reply to that person privately, if you so choose.
The new WhatsApp Status feature started rolling out to users on Monday and will be available soon around the world for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone users.
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WhatsApp said it's introducing this feature to celebrate its anniversay. The app launched nearly eight years ago, on Feb. 24, and was originally designed for sharing status updates. In those early days, people could type a short line of text to let their friends know what they were up to, a la AOL Instant Messenger's away messages. WhatsApp eventually redesigned itself as a messaging app after noticing that people were using it to communicate in real time.
Snapchat fans, however, will likely notice the similarities between WhatsApp Status and the ephemeral messaging app. After failing to acquire Snapchat in 2013, Facebook has simply created its own version of Snapchat's most popular features across its own apps in recent years, from Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories to WhatsApp Status.
WhatsApp said its users now send 50 billion messages every day, including more than 3.3 billion photos, 760 million videos, and 80 million GIFs. In the last year, photo sharing on the platform has doubled and video sharing has tripled.