
However, Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, pre-announced the details during his keynote at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday (with a video of it posted earlier today here).

The company is expected to officially announce Viber Communities tomorrow. Members of the groups will be able to interact with comments and reactions, and group administrators will be able to monetize the streams, tapping into a network of app partners and the larger e-commerce and media business of Rakuten, which owns Viber (and is known as the Amazon of Japan). In a bid to drive more usage and bring in more users to the app, Viber is launching a service called Viber Community, with group “limits” of up to 1 billion members - that is, limited only by the number of people registered on Viber itself, which, it says, now has passed the 1 billion mark. Now messaging app Viber is introducing the biggest group chat of them all.

But they also have been adding large group chat options into the mix, to give a more social experience on those messaging platforms.

Messaging apps have seen a surge of popularity in recent years as people seek ways to communicate more directly than on social networks.
