Facebook Messenger Wishes to Takeover Zoom and Houseparty

Here we are working day and night from home and tech companies are evolving to support this transition. Working from home or WFH is gradually becoming the norm. Besides that, the ability to be electronically present across the world is magic. Video calling, voice calling, group text chats, group voice calls, group video chat, and now group video conferencing for business. Facebook Messenger has jumped on this bandwagon with its offering. Indeed, we are witnessing a trend and this is more than welcome.

Facebook Messenger Joins the Party

Facebook owns nearly half of the population with its three major apps which are Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Their combined user base is more than 4 billion today. The number of monthly active users on the Facebook Messenger app alone surpasses 1.3 billion. With such a large audience and products like Zoom, Houseparty, Google Classroom it was time Facebook released its offering. Thus, we have today the Messenger Rooms.

This is a new feature in its Messenger app that supports real-time chat video call. With rumors around it seems across its three platforms the max number will be fixed to eight at a time. But, Messenger Rooms surely has some bells and whistles of its own, and they make it different from its peers.

Messenger Rooms and its Features

Facebook Messenger Rooms is a new feature that is supposed to take advantage of over 700 million calls daily on its other two apps. With the real-time video skyrocketing, Facebook took notice and started working over it months ago. In Messenger Rooms, users will be able to create a virtual hangout, similar to Google Hangouts. The best part is you can use your Facebook account and invite anyone to join right away. No additional registration or creating a new account with another new app. sounds good?

But, the party doesn’t end here. You can join in a meeting or hangout even if you do not have a Facebook account. This has to be the best part of this feature yet. Once you have created a room, you can share it on Facebook through the News Feed, Events, or Groups. With all this you can do all normal stuff like removing and adding people, locking a room down for private users only, blocking and reporting someone, and so on. Privacy is a thing that Facebook Messenger occasionally delivers as well.

More Tech than You will Probably Need

In the Facebook Messenger app, you can access additional features like the AR effects, mood lighting, and the 360-degree background effects as well. This is for customization and spending more time fiddling around. The Messenger Rooms chat can accommodate up to 50 people, so is ideal for classroom settings like Zoom and Google Classroom. There are plans to even incorporate this new feature called Messenger Rooms into WhatsApp, Instagram Direct as new features with a software update.

As of now, it is to be seen how successful the new feature is and whether it can take over Zoom-alikes who have already established a proper user base.