• WhatsApp has announced that its Channels feature is launching in an additional 150 countries.
• 10 countries were initially selected for the rollout of the Telegram-like social media feed, but South Africa is still being left out.
• Mark Zuckerberg has created his own Channel where is he giving updates on WhatsApp and Meta.

After first announcing its Telegram-like Channels feature in June, Meta on Wednesday began rolling out to more nations after initially launching in 10 countries. Now WhatsApp users in 150 countries have access to Channels.

Channels is basically a social media feed that an account on WhatsApp creates. These channels allow users to follow accounts they deem important, like government agencies or companies. Users will receive notifications when these channels are posted to with images, texts, videos, stickers, polls and more.

“Today we’re excited to launch WhatsApp Channels to over 150 countries and deliver a private way to receive updates that matter to you. We’re welcoming thousands of organizations, sports teams, artists, and thought leaders that people can follow, right within WhatsApp,” reads a press release sent to Hypertext.

Initially, countries like Colombia and Singapore were selected for the Channels launch, now the feature has gone worldwide. It is still not available in South Africa as of time of writing. Meta also did not indicate exactly which countries fall into the 150 list.

After the initial launch WhatsApp saw fit to update Channels, and now allows users to leverage:

• “Enhanced Directory – you can now find channels to follow that are automatically filtered based on your country. You can also view channels that are new, most active, and popular based on number of followers,
• Reactions – you can react using emojis to give feedback and see a count of total reactions. How you react will not be shown to followers,
• Editing – soon, admins will be able to make changes to their Updates for up to 30 days, when we automatically delete them from our servers,
• Forwarding – whenever you forward an Update to chats or groups it will include a link back to the channel so people can find out more.”

“This is just the beginning, and we’ll continue to add more features and expand Channels based on feedback we get from users. Over the coming months, we’ll also make it possible for anyone to create a channel,” adds WhatsApp.

Mark Zuckerberg launched his own Channel as part of this latest wave. It seems to be a portal where the Meta chief can send updates to users and news from Meta through videos and text. It will be interesting to see if he continues to use the feature in a reoccurring fashion.

When Threads, the Meta Twitter-like platform launched, Zuckerberg was quite active as a means to attract users, but as the popularity of Threads waned due to a perceived lack of features he became less so. Time will tell if Channels is a hit for Meta and WhatsApp or if it will be forgotten by the time the next feature is rolled out.

[Image – Provided]