WhatsApp Status another attempt to clone Snapchat?

Celebrating its 8th birthday on February this year, the facebook owned company is rolling out a new *clone*update with WhatsApp Status

The newest update titled WhatsApp Status will offer users the chance to share pictures, short videos, and GIFs with their contacts. Users can doodle or apply stickers to their pictures and proceed to share them as their ‘Status’, which will be visible for 24 hours.

As you may know, WhatsApp is one of Facebook’s expensive acquisitions, who have a history of ‘borrowing’ features from Snapchat and evidently have no immediate plans of breaking the pattern.

So say goodbye to the boring old text updates, like ‘At The Gym’ and show people that you are at the gym; at least that is what WhatsApp Status may have in mind.

It gives users some more room for playfulness and also has the potential to keep them coming back if they love it. Not to mention, the dreaded day when business would also spill over onto the world’s most popular instant messaging platform.

Ever since the platform was acquired by Facebook, people were expecting how the company would move forward to monetize the platform considering the huge amount of money they paid for it.

“As a utility, we’re focused on building features that will be used around the world by our 1.2 billion users,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told Forbes. “Over time, we’ve seen a big uptick in users sharing rich content, such as photos, videos and GIFs on WhatsApp. We wanted to offer an simple, secure, and reliable way for people to share this type of content with all their contacts at once.”

The platform was initially created with one idea, that of sharing your ‘status’ with your friends, and when the founders saw the potential, they expanded to messaging and never looked back.

If you are wondering whether the existing status tab next to your profile picture will disappear, no it won’t. The new ‘Status’ update will be denoted by the ‘+’ sign which will take users to WhastApp camera, and just like Snapchat, you can reply to your friend’s status with a WhatsApp message.

WhatsApp Status would soon be available for users iOS, Android and Windows Phone users across the world.

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