Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that WhatsApp will soon allow users to create new group chats without having to name them. Anonymous groups will be given an automatically generated name based on their participants. In a screenshot shared by Zuckerberg, we can see such a group titled “Rocco & Li-Chen”.
While it’s a minor innovation, not having to name each group chat can be useful for one-off events. Being able to see the names of participants in the chat list instead of a regular group chat thread sounds like a good improvement.
According to TechCrunch, this innovation also has an important limitation: Anonymous groups will normally be limited to six participants rather than a thousand who can join a WhatsApp group. The app will use the names you save individually for contacts to create a group name, which means group names will look different for different participants (so if you have a contact saved as “Mom”, you’ll see “Mom” in the group chat name).
The new automatic group naming feature will be available to WhatsApp users on iOS, Android, web and macOS in the coming days.