WhatsApp has been around for close to two decades now, but this year marks ten years under Meta ownership. In this time, Meta’s other social media apps with an instant messaging focus, such as Instagram and Messenger, have had a huge impact on WhatsApp, influencing how Stories, status updates, and ephemeral messages were implemented. Now, it appears, WhatsApp is set to copy another aspect from Instagram by letting users tag their contacts in status updates.
WhatsApp’s status updates are a convenient way for individuals to share images and videos with most of their contacts, without running into message forwarding restrictions. Moreover, status updates disappear after 24 hours, and give you much more creative freedom with annotation, link sharing, and textual update support. However, Meta has maintained WhatsApp’s appeal as a personal messaging solution, as opposed to social options on Facebook and Instagram.
That’s set to change, because beta testers at WABetaInfo recently spotted WhatsApp working on contact tagging for stories, just the way you can tag someone on Instagram and Facebook stories. The feature is currently in the works, but surfaced in beta version 2.24.6.19. Although it isn’t clear if the tags will be visible to all your status viewers, anyone you tag will be notified about your status update instantly. This will help them avoid getting overlooked, and it could also serve as a great way to share pictures with a large audience and include a special hat-tip to a few people.
Details about this development are scant, so we aren’t sure if there’s a limit on the number of people you can tag, if you’re allowed to tag people who aren’t in your contacts, or if tagged posts are visible only to the people mentioned. In any case, it looks like a great alternative to telling people “Hey, look! I posted status updates from that event we attended together.”
Support for pinning messages and conversations seems to be high up on WhatsApp’s list of priorities, along with status updates. The developers were recently spotted testing a new status shelf design which gives users a preview of the media their contacts posted. Hopefully, we get to learn more about these features soon.
Maybe if we start telling people the brain is an app they will start using it!
