Things to know about the new Facebook Messenger
December 18, 2016
Just like the latest update of Dota 2, the Facebook Messenger App has recently seen new light. The update has received mixed reactions from its loyal users. Like the Dota 2 update, some of the users of the Messenger app disliked the new face of the Messenger, while some just swallowed the bitter pill and moved on.
Here we’ll try to discuss about the things that need to be known about the latest update of the Facebook Messenger App.
Opening the app welcomes users to a whole new Messenger UI (User Interface). Unlike the previous Messenger UI, the new interface is a lot more lively.
Navigating through the Messenger, one will surely notice the blue circle on the lower middle portion, this blue circular thingy will direct users to the Messenger camera. The camera has a lot of nifty features which take capturing photos and recording short videos to a whole new level. It’s like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger’s love child. A shortcut to get to the Messenger camera is to drag the whole messenger screen down. The lower part of the Messenger still holds the Home, Calls, Groups and People buttons.
Looking closely into the new Messenger, one will notice that the upper portion still holds the Search bar where users search for a certain Facebook friend, page or individual. On the left side of the Search bar is the profile/menu icon – it shows the user’s profile and other options that affects the profile which is logged in the Messenger. The right side of the search bar holds the new message button, this button lets users create a message for a certain individual whose profile is visible to public.
Just below the search bar lies a couple of new modules. The tricky part about these modules, which make the new Messenger a bit confusing, are they appear randomly. There’s a certain module which will show a list that contains the user’s Active friends. The featured Active friends on this module appear randomly and would change from time to time. But if users would want to see the full list of their Active friends, they’ll just simply touch the “see all” text which is in the same module. User’s favorite contacts and unseen messages have labels now and are separated in different modules. All of these appear randomly every time users freshly open the app.
Unfortunately, these new modules may confuse a number of users, so to lessen the confusion, Facebook added a hide option which will appear when a user touches the three dots that are inline with the label of a module. However, modules may reappear whenever there’s a new content to it.
The biggest and newest addition to the Messenger would be the My Day module. This module lets users share their daily life through photos or short videos. These photos and videos will appear on Messenger for 24 hours and will be visible to the user’s friends. However, just like the other modules, the My Day module has an option to hide the videos or photos from people on the user’s friend list. Users are given two options of hiding their photos and videos on Messenger, one option is to hide it from a certain person, while the other option lets users hide their photos and videos from everyone except to the people he/she selected. Oh! Users can also see the numbers of people who watched or looked at their My Day photos and videos.
Unfortunately, this module cannot be hidden. Sad as it may seem, but we think this will be the Messenger that we would be seeing from now on.