iWorld
Twitter India appoints Apurva Dalal to lead its engineering efforts
NEW DELHI: With the aim to strengthen its operations, Twitter has appointed Apurva Dalal as director of engineering in India. Being a priority market, and Twitter's fastest-growing market globally, the microblogging platform is also planning to hire for other roles in the country, including research, design, and product development.
Dalal will be based in Bengaluru, and he will be working to bolster the company’s engineering capabilities and offerings for local and global audiences.
"Starting today, Apurva will become the senior-most member of the engineering team in the country and will be responsible for strengthening our engineering capacity as well as our offerings for local and global audiences," said Twitter vice president of engineering Nick Caldwell in a statement.
Apart from the United States, Twitter has dedicated engineering teams in sites like London, Toronto, Singapore, and Bengaluru.
"The focus on developing engineering capabilities in India comes as part of our broader goal to increase our development velocity, including building a strong foundation for our product. This is what the core team will be focused on based out of Bengaluru," the social networking giant said in the statement.
Dalal has more than two decades of experience in engineering and he has worked in global organisations like Google, eBay, and Uber. Until recently, he was serving as the engineering site lead for Uber in Bengaluru.
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
