Although it is by far the most used service in the world in its segment, WhatsApp It keeps rolling out new features and options to prevent competitors led by Telegram from taking away users. Maybe someone says that WhatsApp plagiarizes Telegram, and on many occasions it can be considered true.

Apparently, some users of the beta branch of WhatsApp for Android and iOS have received a new feature that will allow them to do so share videos up to sixty seconds longa format that may resemble TikTok and shorts from YouTube. This is apparently nothing out of the ordinary: users hold down the virtual microphone button, the symbol changes to a camera, and then they can record videos that are shared through conversations.

The intention of these short videos is to create a new message format or what is the same, videos will be messages that will be sent through conversationsso if what we know is confirmed, it would be like a kind of vitaminized voice messages with options that offer images shown in videos, which opens the door to going without sound depending on what you want to send.

A characteristic feature of alleged messages in video format is that recipients will be able to see if the message was recently uploaded therefore, to ensure its veracity, they should theoretically be easily distinguishable from those previously recorded and sent somewhat later. This is in addition to the end-to-end encryption that WhatsApp uses to protect users’ privacy and data.

WhatsApp has announced new features over the course of this year, such as channels for following topics that interest users, screen sharing, and usernames. Meta wants users to be able to share not only texts, but messages in many different ways, and wants to promote features more related to communities and social networks, many of which were implemented in Telegram a long time ago.

We’ll see how the short video messages go in seconds, but at least from the outside it smacks a bit that WhatsApp wants to take advantage of the traction that TikTok and shorts from YouTube.