As far as messaging on smartphone is concerned, I usually prefer WhatsApp, though I was aware about WeChat, but honestly never thought about installing it on my phone, till I receive an invitation to attend a bloggers meet on WeChat.
Read on this blog post of mine to know more about my experiences at the Blogger’s Meet on WeChat and the 20 things which you might not know about WeChat.
This Blogger’s Meet was organized by WeChat on 23rd of July, and the location was the Offline restaurant of Hauz Khas Village, also known as Social Offline. Hauz Khas Village was a place where I never visited earlier, and since everyone at my home was suffering from viral fever I was a bit hesitant to visit there.
But since I accepted the invitation, I went there to attend the meet, and once the meet was over I realized that it is truly worthwhile as I came through many things about WeChat which I was not at all aware of. Unfortunately I failed to install WeChat on my tablet that day because of limited space available on my phone, but it certainly attracted me with some of its awesome features.
Honestly, we were discussing about WeChat as an app for youngsters only, and since we are a bit old, we thought it is not meant for it. The bloggers meet on WeChat cleared my doubts about it.
One issue which I faced with Social, the place where I was going for this meet, was having different haordings throughout the place as if they are located there only, and it confused me so badly that I came out of the Auto around one kilometer back only, and then in high fever I had to walk for around one kilometer to locate them 🙂
Let me tell you some facts about WeChat first:
Normally WeChat is a free communication app through which you can send instant messages to the contacts of your mobile phone. You can download it for free and use it for free as well. As per the country head of WeChat they are not going to charge anything for using it, even in future as well.
When it comes about local languages in India, WeChat supports 20 local languages which is quite good, now you can send messages in your own language as well.
Including the web and MAC versions of WeChat, other than the mobile ones, it supports around 7 operating systems, which makes it a versatile app.
As per the GlobalWebIndex, WeChat is the fastest growing social app worldwide. It has a considerable growth of around 1098% in Q1 of the year 2014 than of the same duration last year, which is quite impressive. By the way GWI is a third party research firm which majorly tracks social apps only.
Growth of WeChat in India is also quite significant. I was not aware of the real growth of this social app in India, but these stats are really impressive:
These are some features which even I was not aware of, thankfully came to know about them through the blogger’s meet only:
Normally we think about WeChat as a messaging app, but it is offering more than simply text messages. It provides the facility of free voice and video calls. You can make calls that too the video calls, to anyone, anywhere and on any device, I guess even on PC too, if the PC has installed the WeChat.
With text messages, voice and video calls, you can also send voice messages to your near and dear ones through WeChat.
Is not it sounds interesting?
This was a feature which even I was aware of through their advertisements, though WeChat was not even installed on my tablet or smartphone. They do have hundreds of free animated stickers which you can send to your friends and near and dear ones at anytime.
With the help of WeChat you can also do group chat and the maximum number of people in a group chat can be up to 100.
This is an interesting feature of WeChat through which you can easily be able to meet up your friends.
This is a feature which will definitely attract gaming lovers. They can not only be able to play free games on WeChat, but they can also be able to challenge their WeChat friends.
It is a feature which you can call as similar to Facebook walls, but as in FB we can share any types of message like text, images, videos, etc. on our wall, but in Moments you can only share the pictures.
Is not it (Having FB type features inside WeChat) sounds interesting?
As the name suggests it is a feature which can easily give you the locations of people who are using WeChat in your nearby area, and you can simply add them at once. You not even required looking for their phone numbers.
You can search for your keywords through all the conversations. It is a feature which can give complexion to Google as well 😉
You can use WeChat even on your phone as well as on your PC too.
Other than those 10 things there are 10 new and interesting things as well which we were not aware of WeChat, and those are:
You will be surprised to see that many tiny cakes are flying on the screen of your friends whom you wished Happy Birthday just now. It is an interesting feature of WeChat in which you can get the rain of emotions for sending some particular keywords like Happy Birthday, I Miss You, XoXo, etc.
Honestly it is a feature which I liked the most. In the heat of an argument we sometimes send away some messages which can ruin many things, unfortunately there is no such options available with any instant messaging apps which can allow us to redo the mistake.
Though in WeChat you can have this opportunity; by long pressing the message you can actually delete it from your friends screen, though within two minutes after sending it only to avoid any such harsh situation. No matter if your friend has checked it already, still it can disappear from their screen and you can claim that “I don’t say anything of such nature”.
One common features; though you can translate message of any language to your preferred language instantly with WeChat.
Does not this feature making it a cool app?
You can anytime turn off the notifications of your chats or group chats and that too for indefinite time as well.
Sometimes a few messages are types in such a manner (many a times the copy-paste ones) that it becomes hard to read them on single screen. With the help of WeChat you can double tap and easily view it in a read view.
Seamless transaction – nice one.
Though I am not sure about the exact amount of the space but as far as I remember they mentioned it as 1 GB free space on the cloud server of WeChat for every user to store their favorite messages, which I think is sufficient enough.
You can click on a message and hold it for few seconds and can easily make it as favorite one.
You can easily search for conversations with new notifications, by clicking on two times on the Chat tab.
You can easily mark a message as unread, which you cannot normally do with any other conversation apps.
You can easily tag your friends in a group. Though it is a feature which I normally hate on any app, but using it sometimes is not bad either.
You can easily use this feature to stick a conversation to the top, just like the pin feature of Twitter. This way you can give value to some special people of your life, their conversations will always stick on the top of your screen
So those were some of the new features of WeChat which has the ability to make it a cool application, though it’s a bit heavy in size, but as you know these days smartphones are coming with at least 1GB+ RAM which can make it easy to use on those phones.
Other than all the above features you can also locate nearby things, search for nearby restaurants, stream music, and surf news in Hindi too, and votes on your favorite things as well through WeChat.
These were some of the features which is prompting me to use WeChat more and more, and I suppose you all will also get the inspiration to use it on your smartphones.
Please do share your response about these features of WeChat. Please do let me know your comments about this blog post of mine. I will be glad to hear what you think about this blog post of mine.
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