You could already use WhatsApp's search bar to find a particular conversation, so if you know who you're looking for, this update isn't likely to change much for you. This feature will likely be the most beneficial for finding the chats you've yet to respond to, as it can be hard to remember who you still owe a message to. The Unread filter will show messages you've yet to open and ones you've marked as "unread" to return to later.

The new sort options will live at the top of your messages, so you can easily switch back and forth without having to dig into settings. WhatsApp has begun rolling out filters and claims they should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

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Businesses can also customize their start page and display information about their products and services on empty chats, giving customers a glimpse of what's on offer even before they get in touch. To make it easier to respond to multiple inquiries, Telegram Business accounts will also be able to craft and save preset messages that they can send as quick replies. Of course, they can also pre-write greeting and away messages that get automatically sent to customers who contact them. They can use a Telegram Bot to chat with their customers, as well, though we all know how frustrating it can be to talk with a robot when we need to talk to a human customer service rep. All these features are free, but only for those with a Telegram Premium account, which costs $5 a month.

In addition to introducing its new business-focused features, Telegram has also revealed that it's giving channel owners 50 percent of the revenue earned from ads displayed on their channels, as long as they have at least 1,000 subscribers. Based on information previously shared by company founder Pavel Durov, Telegram seems to be doing well financially and can afford to be that generous. Durov told The Financial Times that he expects the messaging app to be profitable by next year and that it's currently exploring a future initial public offering.

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The system keeps conversations safe from eavesdropping and interception using public key cryptography — meaning no one, even law enforcement, can access conversations. At the same time, your message history will also be encrypted. Meta first focused on WhatsApp, which now offers full E2EE, but Messenger will have the same level of protection by year's end.

Getting there wasn't easy though, apparently. "It quickly became apparent that transitioning our services to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle," the company wrote. "We not only needed to transition to a new server architecture but to rewrite our code base to work on multiple different devices, rather than just the server."

Citing an example of a rich preview from YouTube, Meta said its servers currently pull the URL data and then show the video preview in a Messenger chat. With E2EE, though, the app itself visits the shared URL, pulls the relevant image and text information, then sends it. That slows the process down a touch, but it means users still get a full feature set but with the privacy of encryption.

Meta said it's also testing on-device recovery for encrypted chats, requiring users to set up a PIN or generate a code. It's also trialing an option to save chats on cloud storage services like iCloud. Meanwhile, Meta will complete its E2EE trifecta by also enabling it for Instagram DMs by the end of 2023.

That will effectively catch the company up to services like Signal, bringing end-to-end encryption fully into the mainstream. It might also draw the ire of nations like Spain, which has advocated banning encryption within the European Union, ostensibly as a way to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other criminal activities.

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Strava users can engage with the platform to send exact routes or activities to others, making it possible to do things like coordinate community runs on the app. Previously, athletes on Strava had to go off-platform to discuss meetup events on the app on other platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook.

The chat settings feature can be managed so that a user can send or receive messages to and from mutuals or accounts already being followed. You can also elect to have no one be able to message you unless you initiate a chat. For group chats, creators can add or remove participants and grant members access to invite others or leave a conversation if they’d like. To further deepen the interactions, Strava is also including features like reacting to messages with gifs or likes.

Strava, which claims it has over 100 million users and 40 million activities uploaded per week, has been attempting to become more than just a tracking tool for runners and bikers. Messaging expands the app’s capacity for it to become a more engaging tool for like minded fitness-focused individuals to convene in real life. Creating a chat tool is in line with Strava’s other social media-adjacent offerings previously dropped, such as when it gave app users the option to curate feeds or create posts. Recently, Strava also integrated music streaming directly onto its platform and has made some of its premium-only features accessible to free users in an attempt to continue to grow its base and offerings.

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First up, the AI will auto-generate channel recaps to give you key highlights of anything you missed while away from the keyboard or smartphone. Slack says the algorithm that generates these recaps is smart enough to separate the content from the various topics discussed. In other words, if your co-workers launched into a debate about coffee beans and also talked about third-quarter earnings or whatever, you should get a paragraph on both.

There’s a similar tool available for threads, which are basically just one-on-one or group conversations that don’t occupy an entire channel. This lets users “get up to speed on any thread in just one click.” Now you can safely ignore that one colleague who messages you eight times in a row when one short paragraph would absolutely suffice.

Another cool feature here is conversational search. This allows you to ask a question using natural language instead of using Slack’s pre-existing search bar to slowly crawl through previous chats. The algorithm does the crawling for you, providing you with a “clear, concise answer based on relevant conversational data.”

It remains to be seen just how much time these tools will save the average user throughout the workday, but Slack says it remains committed to artificial intelligence. To that end, the company is prepping more native AI features, including the ability to generate personalized summaries of channels that users don’t check daily but want to keep an eye on. Additionally, Slack says it’ll soon integrate some of its most-used third-party apps into the AI ecosystem.

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“Plenty of Discord Developers out there have had their eyes on Activities, wondering when they could create their own,” the company wrote in a blog post. Prior to this announcement, these tools were limited to select developers. Currently, Discord users can do stuff like watch YouTube, play poker and share a whiteboard while participating in a chat. The SDK should open up the floodgates and allow for a drastic increase in the number of available shared experiences. So how long until Doom shows up?

The platform’s also bringing back app pitches. This program encourages developers to pitch app ideas and snag up to $30,000 in funding. Discord ended up funding some cool stuff last year, including a coral reef cam, a city-building sim and an art portfolio app, among others. Who knows what 2024 will bring.

Finally, Discord announced that it’s experimenting with technology to allow users to add apps to their accounts, so these experiences will follow them across servers. A beta version of this tool will launch alongside the SDK on March 18. The company says that users will begin to see apps popping up “within DMs, group chats and small servers.”

These updates come just two months after the company announced a brutal round of layoffs that impacted 17 percent of its workforce. CEO Jason Citron said the cuts were necessary to put Discord “in the best position to continue building a strong and profitable business.” To that end, the company recently unveiled a partnership program with game developers to sell themed avatars and various profile effects.

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