Facebook released revamped Messenger a few days back with the attempt to draw attention back to chats. After so many years of profit-based changes to the messenger including payments, games, and more, Facebook has finally made changes to Messenger for the basic feature, i.e. messaging.
As Facebook Messenger was bombarded with widgets, the new Messenger is no different, but all the widgets are placed in corners where they can be ignored easily. It still promotes business purposes via the app, however the app’s focus is back to the basics and is lightweight according to developers.
As per David Breger, a product manager on the app, “Messenger as an app is really powerful. But if you look at something like this, I don’t know if the first word you would use is ‘simple.’”
The Messenger with time became quite complex. So many tabs for people, games, and businesses etc. Also, you could see tabs for people who active on Messenger and have been in contact with, and for your groups and more.
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Journey In Short:
Messenger was the way to send messages to Facebook users while on your PC. But in 2014, it became an independent mobile app. Then, it tried to mimic WeChat after noticing its success as a digital wallet & identity system.
There were a lot of challenges encountered by the Messenger team. Their motive is to develop a big business around apps which are commodified, is a tough nut to crack. The app is used by 1.3 billion users a month, which means millions of people use every feature, making it difficult to manage all the features at a time.
Changes Induced To Messenger
Visual changes: The button used to initiate a new message is now a tiny square beside the search bar and a button to capture photos & videos is placed in the center bottom of the menu.
Earlier Messenger had Short lived stories of its own also known as Day, which used to be visible on above the chats. Also, whenever you shared a personal image on a chat, it suggested to post it as public post. It has been removed from the Messenger after some time, after much outrage from users.
Stan Chudnovsky who took over Messenger this year said, “We’ve built a lot of capabilities over the years, but is not as simple as the app was when we first began our journey. We had a decision to make here: we can continue to pile on, or we can build a new foundation that would really enable us to build simplicity and powerful features on top of something that’s new and something that goes back to its roots.”
New Messenger will have only three tabs instead of nine. Once the app is open it shows your chats. You can view six chats on a single screen.
The video/photo button is killed-off. Instead of that, a small camera icon is placed beside the icon used for sending a new message. Moreover, the mid tab is People which works as Phonebook.
People who are active on Messenger, when you are online, will be shown at the top of your contacts list. Alongside the contact name, you can see hand emoji used to send a wave to a friend.
One of the most stupefying things is that new Messenger shows Facebook stories twice, once at the top of chats, where you can see which friend of yours is active on Facebook Messenger and another one in the people tab, placed at the in a line over your phone address.
The last tab is “Discover” which can be used to find games and businesses under a section “For You” Inside the discover tab, there’s a subsequent tab called “businesses” that highlights of a catalogue of brands.
Messenger individual chat has also undergone changes. You can alter the color of your chats to be gradient, whenever you scroll through the chat, color changes. Now you can give a nickname to any friend in chats.
Also, you can use gestures to start a voice or video calls. Just swipe towards the right of a person’s name to get icons to choose to initiate a call. In the forthcoming updates, Messenger will have dark mode as well.
The Thing That Remains The Same
One thing that has been steady in stressing to start new conversations, therefore promoting to use the app. This could be a valid clarification why it lets you know how many friends are online and active.
Chat still has its features. Every individual chat provides you with the choice to send stickers, text, video an emoji, a photo, or voice memo. To access more of the features such as location sharing, tap on the four dots
Facebook has revamped Messenger app and it seems to be its best to go back to basics for customer satisfaction. So, let’s face it, new Messenger is not as fast as conventional but at least it seems to be placed where we can chat with our friends without unnecessary distractions.
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