WhatsApp Brought in New 'Status' Related to Snapchat Feature

Whatsapp is clearly dominating global instant messenger market at present. It has been pushing in some seriously interesting updates from the past few months, turning it for the first time into a platform for passively consuming content, similar to the way people scroll through their Facebook or Instagram newsfeeds.

According to a blog post, Jan Koum, co founder of WhatsApp made the announcement:

   We are excited to announce that, coinciding with WhatsApp’s 8th birthday on February 24, we are reinventing the status feature. Starting today, we are rolling out an update to status, which allows you to share photos and videos with your friends and contacts on WhatsApp in an easy and secure way. Yes, even your status updates are end-to-end encrypted.

This update will expire after 24 hours, and is also said to be encrypted end-t0-end. Meanwhile, you can sense that new status feature is much similar to the famous “Stories” by  Snapchat. Facebook has also started testings, a “Stories” section of their mobile app.

How to Use New WhatsApp Status Features

As you would expect, Status gets a tab of its own, in between Chats and Calls. It's easy to create Status messages, especially if you've used the aforementioned Stories feature in either Snapchat or Instagram. WhatsApp Status updates you create are visible to your contacts by default, though you can change them to My contacts except... or Only share with... as well.