Facebook’s first messaging app is formally 10 years outdated, and the corporate is celebrating the event with a handful of recent options and updates.
Messenger is introducing “birthday” variations of a number of of its current options, similar to birthday soundmoji, AR results, stickers, chat themes and different results. Users may also be capable of ship money to associates as a “birthday gift” with Facebook Pay, which is basically like another person-to-person fee in Messenger however provides some new celebratory animations.
The app can be including a brand new kind of mini sport to chats with “poll games.” The function permits associates in group threads to weigh in on lighthearted polls that ask which member of the chat is “most likely” to do one thing like miss a flight or combat zombies. Both the brand new birthday results, ballot video games, and birthday gifting are rolling out now. Messenger additionally previewed a brand new “word effects” function coming “in the near future” that permits customers to pair an emoji with a selected phrase or phrase so as to set off an in-chat animation just like iMessage’s particular results.
The updates underscore simply how a lot Messenger has modified in its first decade of existence. Originally launched in 2011, the app developed from a fundamental chat app to 1 so bloated with options it’s been redesigned instances within the final two years. It’s been dwelling to lots of Facebook’s extra bold — although not all the time — options through the years.
More lately, Facebook has been weaving Messenger extra tightly into its different providers by pushing customers to hyperlink their with their Messenger account. Facebook needs to convey this similar sort of “cross-app communication” as effectively, although the corporate hasn’t mentioned a lot about how or when it might occur. Likewise, it’s nonetheless not clear when Messenger will activate end-to-end encryption as a .
During a name with reporters, Facebook’s Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky mentioned that the rollout of encryption as a default is transferring slowly partly because of the sheer variety of options within the messaging app. “We need to rebuild all these features in [an] end-to-end encrypted environment, and make them fully capable,” he mentioned, noting that Messenger continues to be constantly including new options. “It’s almost like we are constantly trying to catch up with ourselves.”
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