In late April this year, Facebook launched the Messenger Rooms to allow users to conference with other people at a time. The new service was unveiled to compete with the other video conferencing apps that had sprung up in the coronavirus outbreak like Zoom, Houseparty, among others.
At the time of launch, Facebook said 700 million people are chatting on daily video calls on Messenger and WhatsApp combined. There are also now over 800 million daily active users across Facebook and Instagram Live, and the company is constantly adding new features to make Lives even more useful.
It is evident that the Rooms service has already become popular among Facebook users. The company is now rolling out a completely new and easier way to create and discover Rooms within the Messenger app. In the development, you can now create, share, manage and drop by a room all within your app.
Some of the features to enjoy within Messenger include:
- Discover Rooms: Rooms that you have been invited to will show up at the top of your Chats tab in your Inbox.
- Create Rooms: Ability to create a room is front and center in your Chats tab.
- Edit Rooms: You can create a room with a default, suggested or custom activity, set a future start date and customize your audience selection.
- Manage Rooms: View, join, and edit the rooms you have created. You can also invite more people to a scheduled room and delete a room you don’t want to be active anymore.
- Share Rooms: Send notifications to ensure your invited friends don’t miss out.
Facebook is also introducing the ability to customize your background with your own photos. This means that you can now video chat from your favourite sunset. You could even customize your background with a funny home video.
Facebook also recently launched a Messenger app for MacOS and Windows to let users easily video chat on their desktop computers and stay connected with friends and family anywhere across the globe.
