After previewing the option in 2020, today, at its first ‘conversation’ messaging conference, Meta announced that it was launching WhatsApp Cloud APIWhich will provide Free, secure cloud hosting service for businesses.
It sounds like the WhatsApp Cloud API will basically host your conversation data on the Meter server, which will improve connectivity and speed, but will come with a degree of privacy trade-off.
The main benefits will be improving the speed of messaging response, while also helping to reduce server costs, which can be a big advantage especially for small businesses. It will also provide quick access to new WhatsApp business features as it becomes available.
The downside is the greater reliance on this, when you need to thin out WhatsApp’s messaging security features:
As Meta described in its original announcement:
“If a business chooses to use a third-party vendor to operate the WhatsApp Business API on their behalf, we do not consider it end-to-end encrypted because the business you are messaging has chosen to give the third-party vendor access. Those messages. If the third party vendor is Facebook, it will be too. ”
For example, WhatsApp will include new notifications on customer-to-business exchanges managed through metahosting.
How you feel about this type of trade-off will come down to your personal perspective, but the offer can be extremely valuable to small businesses seeking to build their tech stack, without signing up to a third party hosting vendor, or having their own hardware purchased. .
But again, it also means increasing your reliance on money, which has infamously changed the rules of business in the past, leaving many unprepared.
The real advantage, however, may be in developing regions, where WhatsApp is an influential messaging platform, and many small businesses are looking for ways to maximize their reach and transact within the app. If Meta can help them build their business, it could be a big step in making WhatsApp a more important utility for many more users, and ultimately providing a direct revenue stream for messaging platforms.
Although it feels like a bit of a honey trap. Meta has already flagged that it will eventually introduce charges for these additional components, without specifying what those costs will be. Once businesses rely on these, it will be too late to come back and trap them with meta-increasing growth, which could eventually become a big earner for the company.
On the other front, Meta has also announced Recurring notifications in Messenger, which will enable businesses to re-engage people in a messaging thread. The feature is currently only available to premium users, which does not cost much to be a part of at the moment, but in the future Meta wants to include new charges for its messaging and hosting tools.
You can see replays of conversation conference presentations Here.
