After Instagram borrowed the Stories feature from Snapchat, Facebook may now soon integrate the tool in Messenger as well.
This back and forth between Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat doesn’t look like ending any time soon. After Facebook-owned Instagram rolled out a Snapchat Stories-like ‘Stories’ feature on its app, Facebook is now reportedly going to integrate a similar feature on Messenger. According to Engadget, Facebook is currently testing the feature in Poland where, under the guise of celebrating the “Messenger Day”, it has rolled out a new tool which lets users on Messenger click and upload photos and videos, that are visible to all their friends, and disappear within 24 hours of being put up. And yes, these Messenger Stories can also be decorated using stickers, tests and doodles, just like in Snapchat, and now in Instagram Stories.
“We know that people come to Messenger to share everyday moments with friends and family. In Poland we are running a small test of new ways for people to share those updates visually. We have nothing more to announce at this time, ” Engadget reported a Messenger spokesperson as saying. Facebook has said that the “Messenger Day” story tool is currently only in testing among a small group of users in Poland. No word is still out on if and when will the feature roll out globally.
Image Credit: TechCrunch
Facebook has incessantly been at it to make the user experience on Messenger more wholesome. Consequently, it has constantly been adding some old, new and borrowed feature to the messaging platform. Messenger, last month, rolled out a new feature called ‘Instant Video’, which again looks inspired from Snapchat’s instant videos. The Instant Video feature sends a live feed by tapping on the video icon, which is placed on the top right corner of the chat screen. As you begin the live feed, the video will float over the active chat conversation and you can view the live feed and chat at the same time.
Also, Facebook is reportedly working on a new ‘Add contact’ feature on Messenger. The feature, allows users to add new contacts or people on Messenger, without actually adding those people on their Facebook friend list. In essence, with the new feature rolled out, Messenger would have a sort of standalone contact list of itself, independent of a user’s friend list on Facebook.
Just a while ago, Facebook also rolled out a ‘secret conversation feature’ on the app, which enables users to self destruct their conversations after setting a timer to it. A secret conversation in Messenger is basically an end-to-end encrypted conversation. Which means, that the particular conversation is meant only for the recipient and sender, and no one else, including Facebook, can access that conversation.
Then there are the Messenger bots that Facebook introduced this year. Within couple of months of the launch, the platform already has more than 11,000 bots. Facebook had revealed that more than 23,000 developers have signed up for Wit.ai’s Bot Engine. Wat.ai is an open platform for natural language processing, which was acquired by Facebook this year.
Facebook recently crossed a monthly active user count of 1 billion for the Messenger app, growing faster than the main Facebook page. The Messenger app saw 100 million active users adding every few months, since the beginning of 2016. While in January 2016, the app claimed to reach 800 million active users, in April it confirmed a user base of 900 million users. And by July it touched a billion.
Source: bgr.in
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