Facebook Messenger Home Screen Gets a Makeover

Messenger Day posts are now located below three new tabs at the top of the home screen: Messages, Active, and Groups. The bottom bar is also getting a refresh. It now has tabs for Home, Calls, the in-app Camera, and People and Games.

Once Facebook rolled out its Snapchat Stories clone inside Messenger, the app started to feel a little busy and disorganized. So, Facebook is giving Messenger a revamp.
 
The social network is reorganizing the Messenger home screen in an effort to make it "your central hub for connecting with the people and businesses you want to in whatever way you prefer." Messenger Day posts still feature prominently, but are now located below three new tabs at the top of the home screen: Messages, Active, and Groups.
"By tapping or swiping to these tabs, you can quickly navigate to where you need to go and get messaging faster," Facebook wrote in a post on the Messenger page.
The bottom bar is also getting a refresh. It now has tabs for Home, Calls, the in-app Camera, and People and Games. When there's something new to check out in one of these tabs, Facebook will put a red dot there to let you know. When you receive a new message, for instance, you'll see a red dot next to the Home button. If you missed a call, you'll see a red dot next to Calls.
"These small changes are designed to make Messenger simpler for you – to help you get to your contacts quickly, jump into your conversations where you left off, start new chats, and stay up to date," Facebook wrote.
Facebook said it plans to roll out these changes worldwide on iOS and Android this week.

 

Facebook wants to know why teens are using group video app Houseparty

The social giant issued a survey earlier this year trying to figure out why teens use group video apps. Could it clone the app?

 

Are you a teenager who uses the group video chat app, Houseparty? Facebook wants to know!

At least Facebook did want to know back in February, and was willing to pay people for their thoughts on the app, which lets users jump in and out of video conversations with friends (or friends of friends).

Screenshots from Facebook’s survey earlier this year.

Facebook

Facebook circulated a survey a few months back that asked, among other things, for responders to share their “most recent experience” using Houseparty or Fam, a separate app which self-describes as “group Facetime” for iPhone users.

Facebook issued the survey to find teenagers who would come to Facebook headquarters to participate in a study about “texting and messaging apps,” including Houseparty. They offered participants $275 in Amazon gift cards to participate.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the survey was legit, and was part of the company’s “ongoing effort to better understand how different groups of people use different technology products, including video messaging.” Facebook runs these studies “all the time,” she added.

The survey was issued just a few months after reports that Houseparty raised $50 million in new venture funding.

Facebook

While it’s clear Facebook is taking an interest in group video apps, it’s unclear what they plan to do about it. Facebook has a history of copying trends that seem to be on the rise, especially among teenagers.

You may remember it tried to copy Snapchat’s disappearing messages concept on multiple occasions back when the app was still young, and when anonymous messaging apps like Secret and Whisper were on the rise, Facebook rolled out an anonymous chat app of its own called Rooms.

The folks behind Houseparty know this well. Before Houseparty existed, the company’s main product was a live video streaming app called Meerkat.

CEO Ben Rubin basically threw in the towel on live video broadcasting in part because Facebook’s live video efforts were starting to pick up and Twitter had recently bought a rival service, Periscope.

So it’s possible that a survey like this means Facebook is preparing to get into group video calls — it already offers group video on Messenger, but not in the same jump-in, jump-out kind of way that Houseparty allows.

It’s also possible that Facebook could look to make an acquisition in this space, though the company tends to start with a build versus buy mentality when it comes to new consumer features.

It’s even possible this survey means little, and that Facebook learned that it doesn’t care about group video chats after all. (If you know more about this, please reach out!)

When we asked Houseparty about the survey, a spokesperson thanked Facebook for doing the research and said, “We’re looking forward to seeing the results!”

We also asked Houseparty if they’ve met with Facebook, and the same spokesperson replied the two companies have “had a few friendly chats about the future of live video,” though didn’t elaborate further.

Facebook, on the other hand, says it doesn’t plan to share any of the results from its study and declined to say whether or not it was still ongoing or if the results were influencing Facebook’s products.

Facebook didn’t immediately get back to a question about meeting with Houseparty, though it’s common for big tech companies to bring in startups to both vet them, but also just learn what they’re building.

Apple drives further into Facebook, Snap territory with video app

 

SAN FRANCISCO - With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple Inc is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world, where its huge base of iPhone users could help it compete with Snap Inc's Snapchat and Facebook Inc's Messenger.

Clips, which will hit Apple's App Store in April, lets customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colorful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters.
The functions closely resemble those that drive Snap's wildly popular Stories feature. With Stories, Snap users string together photos and videos, embellish them and then post them to their feeds.
Apple's new Clips lets users post their video to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and more. But if users post them to Apple's own Messages app, Apple will recommend whom to share it with based on which friends are in the videos and whom the user frequently contacts -- the kind of predictive social features Facebook excels at.
Apple has a huge number of users for Messages, the flagship app for short notes that is built into the iPhone's iOS 10 software. Apple does not say how many people use the app, but it does say that there more than 1 billion iOS devices on the market and that 79% of them run iOS 10.
Apple also says that Messages is the most commonly used app on iOS devices, giving the company potentially up to 800 million users for its latest messaging platform. Snap, by contrast, has 161 million daily active users. While Apple's Clips competitor will technically be a separate app from Messages, it will be tied closely to it for the ability share Clips videos with other Apple users.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users for both Messenger, which was split off from the main Facebook service in 2014, and for WhatsApp, which it acquired for $19 billion the same year.
Apple has been steadily matching the features of Facebook's Messenger. But Apple is also walking a fine line with other messaging players, cooperating with them often as it competes with them. For example, it has opened up the iPhone's dialer app, long closed off to developers, so that iPhone users could place and receive Skype and WhatsApp calls through the device's native interface.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp have been scrambling to get into the game, too. Google has more than a half dozen messaging apps, including Allo, its latest.
Microsoft has tried to integrate chat into its Skype app, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is a popular tool for business notes.
But tech giants obsess over messaging because it is where users are headed, according to analyst firm Gartner. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of US and UK smartphone owners who used social media apps dropped from 85% to 83% while messaging apps jumped from 68% to 71%, a trend Gartner expects will continue.