While WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, offers most of the same functionality, WhatsApp is largely an app that relies on you knowing people’s phone numbers. It also has a “stories” function, Marketplace connectivity, community group chats with members of Facebook groups you’re in, the ability to message businesses, photo filters, emoji reactions and much more. Some of that ambition has become obvious in the years since. Quickly growing to billions of users, the Messenger app was largely considered a great success as its parent company (then called Facebook, now called Meta) wanted messaging to become an all-encompassing platform. It did so by making it impossible to read Facebook messages on mobile without the app. While Facebook has had messaging as part of its product since 2008, Messenger was created to “reduce the friction of messaging,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a Verge interview at the time. But Facebook’s executives – there has been a separate role for “head of Messenger” since at least 2015 – were. When I first downloaded Messenger, I wasn’t thinking about the history of the product as a way to make people more dependent on the Facebook platform. “We’ll build more ways to integrate messaging features in Facebook over the coming year,” head of Meta NZ, Spencer Bailey, confirmed to The Spinoff. In March, Meta said that there were plans underway to integrate Facebook and Messenger again. I never downloaded the Facebook app on it, but I immediately got Messenger, which was separated from Facebook in 2014. After a few years of living room Facebook sessions, I finally got a smartphone. I tell myself I could give Facebook up – I could abandon the newsfeed, the cringe photos of my teenage self, the abundant deals of Marketplace, the weird groups I’ve discovered focused on map projections and the slim possibility of being invited to events – but then I think of Messenger. Facebook Messenger: where all your friends are (Image: We Are/Getty)Īnd then there’s Messenger. For others, there’s the camaraderie of Facebook groups – people who you don’t need to know in real life to share interests or hobbies. For others, there’s the fact that it’s still one of the easiest ways to invite real people to your event. For some people, there’s the thrill of a good deal snapped up on Facebook Marketplace. It still has millions of users, around three million in this country.Īnd the reason those users haven’t all fled to new platforms is that despite the privacy controversies, despite the company’s wholesale determination to eliminate news from its business, despite the misinformation, despite Cambridge Analytica, despite the newsfeed increasingly stuffed with ads, Facebook is still useful. They’re scrolling Instagram, maybe absorbed by YouTube and TikTok, certainly. Certainly my younger siblings and cousins aren’t coming home from school to log into the shared computer to see what is happening on Facebook. From the headlines in business publications, Facebook might seem to be forgotten. I’ve spent the past two months trying to figure out what Facebook means now all those semi-active accounts as the parent company has pivoted to the metaverse, then to AI. Instead, regular use of Facebook seemed normal it was what everyone around me was doing. Sometimes they did.Īll of this dates me, of course the way that Facebook enmeshed with my life as a teenager, the time I spent thinking about it was not because I was particularly internet-obsessed or popular. When I started a blog, I would post links to the things I wrote on Facebook, convinced that my friends would want to read them. I liked the weird power trip in responding to friend requests: delineating who counted as a friend and was therefore worthy of things like the artsy photo of my eyes with the colours enhanced on which had taken me an entire afternoon. I needed it so I could spend an afternoon leaning over my sister’s shoulder by the family computer in the living room, convincing her to tell her crush that he was “skux”. I needed it to see which other people my friends were friends with. I needed it to post pictures I’d taken on my digital camera, of the school dance and a camel I saw. When I was 14 I had to have a Facebook account. But with Meta signalling that Messenger may be folded back into Facebook proper, where will everyone go? Shanti Mathias explores in the final instalment of a series about how we use Facebook today. The messaging app is ubiquitous even among people who go out of their way not to use Facebook.
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