Habit takes us through dozens of icons and symbols we recognize every day in everyday apps, like the red notification medals in iPhone apps or the circle with the number of unread chats in WhatsApp.
For this reason, we may not know what are some of the symbols that we sometimes see in the list of WhatsApp conversations, such as an empty blue circle or with an ‘@’ symbol in it. They appear less, but the reasons for this are very simple.
Why does a WhatsApp chat have a blue circle?
The blue circle appears when you have marked a conversation as unread after reading it. Maybe you did it on purpose, or maybe you did it to emphasize that you should do something about this conversation. Since WhatsApp already counts that you’ve read all the messages, it doesn’t give you an account and just marks it with an empty blue circle. By the way, on Android, this circle is green.
As soon as you enter the chat, WhatsApp will mark it as read again. You can mark a WhatsApp conversation as unread by swiping it to the right and tapping “Unread”:
You can do the exact opposite and mark a chat as read by doing the same gesture, with the option appearing in case the chat has pending notifications to read.
Why does an at sign appear in a WhatsApp chat?
The @, on the other hand, appears when someone mentioned you in a multi-person WhatsApp group. This can be done Twitter style, by writing @name to be able to send an express notification to that user. You can see the @ to the right of the chat, or inside it if there are a lot of new messages and the mention does not appear on the screen:
These characteristics they somewhat mimic social networks like Twitter and other messaging apps, like Slack, where these @mentions carry more weight because they are likely to be important job notices. No one has established this, but it becomes an unwritten rule of this type of service.
