New Delhi, November 11 – On Monday, social networking giant Facebook announced that 500 million people were using its messenger service every month. The app which originally started off as a chat feature on the website was one of Facebook’s first standalone mobile apps focusing on just a feature.
This news comes after recently Facebook made it compulsory for its users to use the dedicated messenger app for IMs and removed the IM functionality from the core Facebook app. Many have criticized this move.
Recently in an AMA session Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw more light on the decision. He claimed with more than 10 million messages being sent per day, the IM function within the main news feed app was not optimal. People had to wait for the app to load and then switch to a different tab, which was not a fast enough experience.
With the messenger app users can dive directly into a chat. He also claimed that in some countries people used SMS or messaging as a primary source of communication more so than Facebook.
“Messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking. In some countries 85 per cent of people are on Facebook, but 95 per cent of people use SMS or messaging.”Facebook’s interest in messaging is intriguing as last year it acquired WhatsApp which is perhaps the most dominant mobile messaging service out there.
In fact, yesterday, WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora told students at the Indian Business School in Hyderabad that is foregoing the $1 per year fee for Indian users due to the lack of a credit or debit card ecosystem. The combination of messenger and WhatsApp make Facebook the undisputed king of instant messaging.
-INDIA TODAY
