The notification icon in WhatsApp and what it means for users.
I am almost confident that most of you have known this, I myself discovered it recently and like a good Technical Writer I went about investigating it. Tried variations of how this thing worked, tested it in my own ways and now am ready to talk about it with you, my dear reader. What I wish to talk about is the new (to me) feature in WhatsApp that tells you when your message was read, who all read it, who all received it, and the times at which it was delivered and read. I find this to be a pretty nifty feature, I can use it for analyzing the level of reception in my WhatsApp group, which topics/members get noticed the most, etc. I am sure that you will have your devious reasons that will benefit from this feature greatly so here goes.
In the name of Galileous I have christened this feature ‘The Notifier‘. It is represented by what looks like the alphabet ‘i’ inside a circle, like so:
I wanted to illustrate it in detail for you, so I have used screenshots from an actual chat. To serve as my guinea pigs for this particular demonstration I chose three of my favorite cousins and our own private group. To conceal their identities I named them Tom, Dick and Harry; names more suitable to common folk. I hope that they will not take offense to this and let me assure you fellas (if you happen to be reading this) that this is in no way, shape or form an indication of what I think about you.
A typical group chat will look like this:
In order to access The Notifier tap and hold over any of your messages (like you would to delete/copy/forward a message in the chat window). Your message should get highlighted like so:
See the icon of The Notifier up there? Select it. A new window will open, this is the Head Quarters of The Notifier. They have an official drab name for this screen (Message info) but HQ to The Notifier sounds much more cooler don’t you think?
Observe this window for a moment, it has three parts:
- Your message
- Read by
- Delivered to
They are pretty much self-explanatory but while continuing to not doubt your intelligence let me go on and humor my OCD and talk a little about the last two sections. The Delivered To section shows you which members have received your message, along with the time at which they were delivered. Thankfully, Harry was connected to the internet and so received it immediately, the other two did not at the time receive it (observe here that this section tells you how many members are yet to receive it as well). Now comes the Read by section, this is where the the niftyness comes into play. Not only does this section not tell you who all read your message, but also when it was read and when it was delivered. Let’s dive into this section.
God bless Harry for he read it soon as he could, if you tap on it you will get a sort of sub-section that opens up to show you more details.
Now ain’t that neat!
When they have all read it the screen will look something like this.
You do know that once your message is read by all in the group it will show two blue tick marks don’t you? Good then, that’s is all there is about The Notifier from my end. Since you have already wasted your time reading through till here, I thought it fun to include a little something else that I kind of specialize in here (yes, yes, add it to my many talents). With this I shall take your leave, my dedicated reader. I will see you soon again hopefully, got loads on my plate blogging-wise and I have still not finalized a suitable theme for the blog so bear with the ever-changing formats and improper image editing. May the Force be with your ISP!
Ciao.
PS: The Notifier works on individual chats too.
You are just a call away from Mark Zuckerberg 😛