Meta's Threads Enhances Live Chats with Translations and Co-Hosts
Quick Look
- Meta's Threads is rolling out new features for its Live Chats, including translation support, co-host capabilities for up to three users, and message deletion for hosts.
- The platform is also expanding access to 'Community Champions' and teasing desktop support and pinned messages.
AI-generated summary
Why It Matters
Meta's Threads is enhancing its Live Chats feature with updates like translation support and co-host capabilities to improve user engagement and accessibility.
Meta’s Threads is adding new capabilities to its recently launched Live Chats feature while expanding access to more users, the company announced on Tuesday. The updates include support for translations, new tools for chat hosts, and more.
With support for translations, conversations in chats become more accessible to users around the world. Threads is also expanding the ability to start Live Chats to all “Community Champions,” which the company describes as users who are highly followed within their communities, regularly post in those communities, and keep conversations active.
Hosts can now also invite up to three co-hosts into their Live Chat to make it easier to manage conversations. Threads says this new capability is the equivalent of having a guest on your show or another voice to moderate a conversation. Additionally, hosts can now delete messages for everyone, and the platform is testing ways to make host messages appear more visually prominent in chats.
When Threads first launched, it struggled to compete with X as a destination for real-time conversations as it lacked key features like robust search, hashtags, and a chronological feed. Since then, Threads has added these capabilities and is now further differentiating itself with Live Chats, a feature designed for real-time engagement that even X doesn’t have.
The idea behind Live Chats is to help make Threads feel more timely and relevant. Since the feature’s launch, Threads says it has seen hundreds of chats hosted almost daily with thousands of users joining. The features added today are in response to what creators have been requesting, Threads says.
With Live Chats, users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in “spectator” mode.
Threads also teased today that desktop support is coming soon and that pinned messages are in the works, both of which have been highly requested by creators.
What to Watch
AI outlook — possibilities, not facts
Desktop support and pinned messages will be released soon.
Likely · Within months
Open Questions
- When will desktop support and pinned messages be fully released?
- What are the specific criteria for 'Community Champions'?
