A big change to the way WhatsApp works has been announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder announced WhatsApp Communities will be rolling out to the service.
Mr Zuckerberg says instant messaging has become "the centre of our digital lives". He says the new feature will help us communicate with different groups of people.
As well as having a number of communities - he used school and work as examples - users would then be able to have smaller groups within them. This means a school community could also have one for each class.
In a Facebook post, he also said new changes would be coming to group chats. These include reactions, large file sharing and bigger group calls.
The change is also expected to have a knock-on effect with Facebook and Instagram. He said it will be rolled out in the "coming months".
Mr Zuckerberg said: "Today we're starting to test a major evolution of WhatsApp that we've been working on: WhatsApp Communities.
"It's been clear for a while that the way we communicate online is changing. Most of us use social networks and feeds to discover interesting content and stay updated.
"But for a deeper level of interaction, messaging has become the centre of our digital lives. It's more intimate and private, and with encryption it's more secure too.
"Our messaging services are built around one-to-one text messaging - and that will stay the core of what we do. But we've also been working on building out the next generation of private messaging.
"With a focus on privacy, safety and security, we've added video chats, voice messages, stories, commerce, payments and more to WhatsApp and Messenger. With today's launch, we're taking this further and enabling people to not only communicate with close friends and contacts, but also with all of the different communities in your life.
"We built WhatsApp Communities to make it much easier to organize all your group chats and find information. You'll be able to bring different group together into one community - for example, in addition to individual groups for different classes, you might have one overall community for parents at a school with a central place for announcements and tools for admins.
"We're also adding new features to groups on WhatsApp, including reactions, large file sharing, and bigger group calls. And because this is WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption and safety features will be built in from the start.
"We're going to start rolling this out slowly, but I expect this to be an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication overall. In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together.
"We'll be building community messaging features for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram as well. I'm excited to see how this progresses as we start testing WhatsApp Communities today and roll it out over the coming months."
