Facebook announced with the dawn of the New Year that it plans to soon issue two new features for its popular Messenger app. The first is the ability to place free voice calls to your friends on the social media website.
A recent report stated that the new feature will only be available at first in Canada. It will be provided in a new update to the Messenger app. It will allow users there to make free online voice calls, also known as VoIP calls.
This new feature is not the only one being released. The other big news on Messenger is that you will soon be able to record messages for your Facebook friends. This new feature is easy to use. You just need to press and hold a large record button in the Messenger application and say what you wish to say. The only real limit is that your recording can be no more than 60 seconds.
There are a number of possible uses for the new functionality. Obviously you will be able to place calls to your Facebook friends. You also could send recorded messages to your friends…it will function effectively as voice mail over Facebook. This could make messaging even easier and more common on Facebook than it is now, given that people will be able to just click a button and leave a voice message.
It appears that Facebook, which also has made upgrades to its Nearby feature, has decided to use Canada as a testing ground for these new Messenger features. The audience in Canada is about 1/10 the size of the US market.
It is expected that these new features will be released in the US after a successful testing period in Canada.
These new updates, combined with such recent news as Facebook’s attempts to gather user credit card information, indicates that Facebook intends to become much more than just a ‘social media’ website in the future. Facebook upper management wants the website to be used by people for many different online purposes, most likely to maximize the possibilities for increasing revenues.