Viber Community: Group chat with a whopping 1 billion members
What's the story
The Rakuten Inc. owned messaging app Viber is launching a service called Viber Community - the biggest group chat ever.
Viber Community will be for people registered on Viber app and will offer group "limits" of up to 1 billion members - a number that Viber has now passed in terms of users on its app.
Here's more about Viber Community.
Details
Viber Community: For people-to-people connect
The CEO of Rakuten, Hiroshi Mikitani, is expected to officially announce Viber Communities tomorrow.
Viber Community will allow members of the groups to interact with one another while empowering group administrators to be able to monetize the streams with ads and other features.
Also, Rakuten will now be able to tap into Viber's user base to promote its large e-commerce business and services.
Welcome to the Club!
The trend of 'super group' messaging
The trend for oversized chatrooms is here and Viber Community is its latest and biggest iteration. We already have Telegram with a group limit of 1,00,000 members, WeChat has 500, WhatsApp at 256 members and Facebook with 150.
So, with Viber Communities, you could be chatting about some topic or point of interest or listening into others', but you'll be part of a club.
Perspective
The making of a social network
Given the popularity of large group chat features, Viber will be driving more active users of the app and perhaps new users to form communities centered toward specific topics and interests.
So in totality, communities will spur conversations and by giving them a size as big as its user base, Viber could transcend itself from a messaging app to a social networking platform.