What's New WeChat: Users Finally Allowed to Share External Links
Cut the chit-chat and gather around to learn the latest about everyone's favorite super-app in our ongoing column, What's New WeChat.
During the recent 11.11 shopping bonanza, you might have received some incomprehensible messages from friends in the form of links to items they wanted to throw in their shopping cart. As confusing as they may have seemed, these links would actually direct you to the site of the corresponding item’s page after copying it and opening Taobao on your phone – should you bother to go through the rigamarole.
All of which begs the question: Why bother making such a detour? Wouldn't simply sending a hyperlink to a chat be much more efficient? Yes, yes it would. However, it's important to remember that Tencent's entire business model revolves around keeping users on WeChat for as long as possible, rather than serving as a window at best, or a door at worst, into other platforms owned by other tech companies.
As such, over the past few years, WeChat users have been barred from sharing external links on their Moments, and for those sent via chats, there was no direct access to the pages, forcing folks to manually copy and paste a link into their browser. Likewise, there was an outright embargo on sharing Taobao links specifically, which explains why the Alibaba engineers had to adopt such a confusing way of evading WeChat's detection.
That, however, is all history now as most of these restrictions were lifted this week, per an announcement from WeChat's official account. According to the announcement, WeChat will roll out new regulations under the supervision of related government departments to facilitate communication between different platforms without compromising users' rights.
After the new update is implemented, all external links shared in private chats – including those from Taobao – will take users directly to the destination page, thus saving everyone the inconvenience of copying and pasting different links and switching between various apps. As for group chats, the function will go through a period of beta testing, pending a period of government inspection no less, to ensure that it won't be abused before it's stabilized.
Moreover, users can now post clickable external links in their Moments, which will make sharing content from websites that don’t have a built-in WeChat forwarding function much easier. And WeChat also plans on granting users the freedom to decide whether they want the direct external link access function turned on or off in a future update.
Having said all of that, if you're a professional WeChat editor and operator like I am, unfortunately, the best is yet to come. We were able to verify that even after this new update, the official accounts of companies and organizations still won't be able to embed external links in articles. Apparently, Tencent still regards official accounts and the user generated content (UGC) community as a core, proprietary function that they don't want to share with others.
Since Taobao began embedding ads for its app in its WeChat links back in 2013, the beef between Tencent and Alibaba – two of China's largest tech juggernauts – has lasted for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, Tencent's move to allow external links is certainly an olive branch and may signal a potential truce down the line. All of this is great news for most users, and hopefully, in the future, they can focus more on elevating user experience rather than wasting their money on petty rivalries.
Images: Jiemian, Wechat, 手谈姬
