Mark Zuckerberg announces 32-person video call on WhatsApp: Details here

Meta Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced the global roll out of a 32-person video calling feature called ‘Communities’ on WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg posted a video on Facebook to announce the new feature, calling it a “major evolution for WhatsApp”.

“We’re launching Communities on WhatsApp. It makes groups better by enabling sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels, and more. All secured by end to end encryption so your messages stay private,” he said.

The new feature will allow admins to better organise the conversations “under one umbrella”, Zuckerberg added.

Besides Communities, WhatsApp also released more features to “improve the group chat experience”, including in-chat polls, larger file sharing, reactions, groups with up to 1,024 users and shareable call links.

Meanwhile, as Meta doubled down on its monetisation drive across its family of apps, Zuckerberg had said that JioMart on WhatsApp in India was going to be a big opportunity for the paid messaging market.

During the company’s Q3 earnings call, the CEO said that paid messaging was another opportunity that we were starting to tap into.

“We launched JioMart on WhatsApp in India, and it was our first end-to-end shopping experience that showed the potential for chat-based commerce through messaging,” Zuckerberg told analysts.