Facebook Messenger for Mac

Free text and video messaging tool from Facebook

Facebook Messenger is a communication app that is born out of the popular social media platform, Facebook. This app offers instant messaging—text, voice, and video—to people anywhere in the world, provided that they have a Facebook account. It’s a chat app that comes with fun and creative features, giving you more opportunities to connect with people. Not only that, but it also offers new functions that will give video conferencing apps, such as Zoom, a direct challenge. 

Introducing Messenger Rooms

Facebook Messenger already offered a video calling function. However, unlike Zoom, video chatting can only support a limited number of participants. When you need to conduct a video conference, or just need to catch up with your group of friends or loved ones, you would need to download a separate video conferencing platform. 

Facebook Messenger aims to give you a new way to connect with a lot of people at once with the new feature called Messenger Rooms. This function seems to be gunning for Zoom’s niche of a group chat facility that is easy to use.  It allows you to create a video chat room that can host up to 50 participants, with no limit on call time, unlike Zoom’s 40-minute limit on a single session. 

Another highlight of the feature is that even those without a Facebook account can join in a video chat, provided that they receive an invitation. However, you need to have access to Facebook Messenger to create a meeting room. The option to do this is in the app’s people or chat pages. You only need to tap the Create a Room button and select the people you want to join.

 If some of the participants don’t have the app, you can invite them by sending them a link. You can also share the room in your News Feed, Groups, and Events. Like with Zoom, users can remove people from calls. They can also lock the rooms with a password to prevent people from just barging in on a call. 

While Messenger Rooms is accessible without the app, using Facebook Messenger for it is recommended. Doing so will give you access to many additional features, such as augmented reality effects. You can also take advantage of the AI-driven immersive 360-backgrounds and mood lighting. However, at present, creating custom backgrounds—like in Zoom—is still not allowed. 

Don’t forget the classics

With the addition of Messenger Rooms, Facebook Messenger has made communicating a lot better. However, that does not mean that its classic features are not note-worthy. For one, it is easy to initiate a one-on-one chat with any user that you have connected with on Facebook. You only need to find them in your list since you automatically connect with them once you accepted their friend request. Not only that, but you can also create a group chat, which allows you to send messages to various people at once.

The theme of the chat is also changeable and you can even put the app in a dark mode. More, the app allows you to send stickers, emojis, and GIFs, which add to the range of ways you can express yourself. On top of that, the app also supports the sending of files in various formats. 

Fully functional communication app

Facebook Messenger is a frontrunner when it comes to instant messaging software. It is easy to use and offers a wide variety of functions to make communicating easier and better. And with the added Messenger Rooms, you can now add video conferencing to its repertoire.