Is Messenger Returning to the Facebook App?
Metas Messenger and the Facebook mobile app have long been separated. To be precise: for a whole nine years. But now the time seems to have come for a reunion.
“We’re testing the ability for people to access their Messenger inbox on the Facebook app,” Facebook CEO Tom Alison wrote in one blog post of March 7 and announces that it will expand these tests “soon”.
The goal behind it: It should be easier for meta users to share content on Facebook without having to switch apps. “On Facebook, we’re seeing a surge in private reel sharing, too,” Alison explains. The short video function on Facebook has only been around for about a year.
According to the Facebook boss, over 140 billion messages are sent via the meta apps every day. Alison therefore has high hopes for the messaging segment. Last year, community chats were introduced in some Facebook groups – and the first results are probably promising: “On Facebook and Messenger, we found that the number of people trying out community chats increased by 50 percent in December 2022 increased,” he writes.
In 2016, Meta was still trying to push mobile web users towards the messenger app. Now the development is going in a different direction. It could be loud in the near future Engadget even be able to send messages to Instagram users via the Facebook app.
Incidentally, the Facebook boss begins his blog entry entitled “Facebook today and tomorrow” with the assertion that “Facebook is neither dead [ist] still dying [liegt]’ as it has two billion daily users.
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The name Tiktok does not appear in Alison’s post, but some of the plans he describes suggest that Facebook may want to do this in the future to better compete with Tiktok. It seems Alison wants to evolve Facebook into an entertainment and discovery platform. Specifically, it means that Facebook should become “the best place for social discovery and sharing,” he writes. It remains to be seen whether this metamorphosis will succeed.
Alison shared his strategy for competing with Tiktok in an interview this week CNN explained. “We believe that content is not just for consuming, but for starting a conversation and starting a message thread with friends,” he said. He believes “that kind of social dimension” that Facebook and Instagram make possible, according to him, differentiates them “from Tiktok and others”.
