It seems that Facebook will release a refurbished version of Messenger, its chat app, which will simplify the user interface. Currently, Messenger has over 1.3 billion users per month, and it previously featured nine different tabs, right now having only three.
The news
Stan Chudnovsky, the Messenger Vice President, attended a press conference this Thursday and had this to say: “This is a new foundation that will give us the ability to start building way faster, way better and way more powerful features.”
The tabs
As we said, there are three new tabs in Messenger. These are Chats, showing your conversations, People, which shows active contacts and Stories, and Discover, the tab that includes chats with businesses and games.
What is the purpose of this change?
Chudnovsky doesn’t expect any changes to monetization happening right away, but he said that the hope is that reducing the number of tabs will make it more evident to people that Messenger can be a place where they can talk business as well.
What is happening now?
Over 10 billion messages are sent between people and businesses each month. For the moment, Facebook uses Messenger to make money by selling ads which appear straight into your inbox or between your friends’ Stories.
Also, there are click-to-message ads which are sold to businesses to show up on Facebook’s timeline.
What happened over the past years?
Facebook kept piling features over the years, which led to people complaining about a user experience that is becoming to clunky. The company also borrowed popular features from Snapchat – Stories, for example, which allows you to post temporary videos or photos.
Messenger Stories
This feature quickly caught on, Facebook and Messenger reporting over 300 million daily active users since September. Starting with Tuesday, we should begin to see the redesign rolling out.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.
