Two decades ago, digitisation was a change in human lives that marked a new era in industrial revolution. But nowadays digitisation has become a new normal. Every industry is competing to provide a better customer experience through digitising their solutions, services and many more. But it does not stop there as this smart era has even entered our lives through handheld devices. Mobile is not very far in becoming a basic need just like air, water, food, clothing and shelter. The advent of a few software applications has made people dedicate their time to social media platforms as well as some individuals to create career opportunities out of it. Two such applications I could think of at the moment are WhatsApp and LinkedIn.
WhatsApp has identified itself as one of the top-rated messaging platforms and packing up a few words into the dictionary like “I’ll WhatsApp you!”, “He or she is WhatsApping”. With regular feature updates, WhatsApp has created a strong user community. The morning starts with searching the phone on bed with half-opened eyes keen on looking for WhatsApp notifications that have popped up overnight. Likewise, the day ends with responding to your loved ones with good night, thinking about what more interesting you can make the conversation tomorrow. The rest of the day everyone would be dealing with their professional lives. We do have software applications making even our professional life easy. LinkedIn is a professional community tool for connecting peers that relate similar interests in the career field to create and explore job opportunities, work experiences and professional blogs. LinkedIn has much eased our way to connect with colleagues and other professional peers. Both Whatsapp and LinkedIn have their purpose in solving problems. WhatsApp is limited to chat features and functionalities whereas LinkedIn is much more than a chat with connecting to industrial peers, experts, writing articles, blogs, job portals, etc. I am revisiting all these known information to prepare the reader to think of an assumption I will be discussing shortly. LinkedIn has a feature that lists the users who have viewed your profile. The advantage of this feature is to help the user to understand his reach among the professional community and showcase his professional strength among the common interests and skills that other people are seeking. This normally happens through hashtags and profiles are highlighted in the search match with the keyword of the search. Let us not dig deep into the technical aspects of algorithms used in LinkedIn. But what if we extract this feature of listing the “people who viewed your profile”. That is integrating this feature in WhatsApp chat profile. How does it look? Now you can start imagining. With this feature let me couple another feature of “How many times a person has viewed your profile?”. If you are finding it complex in imagining this new feature integration, here is a sketch I drew below.
Okay, now you might have started thinking of having this feature. May be people can get to know who is stalking into their profile or what they can call the term “interested contacts”. We never can judge the perception of people, maybe a person might visit your profile if in case the display picture has been changed or if you have an interesting bio updated. But people might be concerned if they have been viewed by an unknown contact. This feature can become pro and con for users. As he or she would know if that his contact has been shared with a stranger at the same time they might start speculating the reason the unknown person has viewed their profile. This might turn into a pain feature than a solution. It leads being suspicious about a person whom you regularly chat and all of a sudden he is looking into your profile daily. You might want to stop messaging that person and ultimately break the relationship with that person. People start judging each other and it is a poor idea if it's coming through a social media platform. The main motive of the messaging tool might be contradicting and WhatsApp may start losing its customer base after implementing this feature. Taking account of the entire aspect only there are few to almost no benefits of adding this feature.
After going through this discussion of pros and cons, let us leave the feature implementation concerns to the product owners and creative thinking team of WhatsApp. It would be better if we just see the WhatsApp as a simple messaging tool, rather than breaking our head too much into its technicality.
But hold on, there is one interesting thought I would want to leave before closing this post. The feature of “Listing people who viewed your profile?” may be put into one of the segments in WhatsApp itself. What would that be? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Thank you! stay safe :).
Appreciate your thought, nice to have both big network in one app
Good one Harsha, the amalgamation can lead to a lot more to unleash, both professionally and personally. You have provoked !!