“The Messenger team’s mission is to make Messenger the best place to communicate with all the people and businesses in the world. We believe we have so much more opportunity ahead of us, and these are still the early days of Messenger.”
Head of Messenger David Marcus, speaking of the plans for Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger has now reached a new Milestone!
They’ve now hit 800 million monthly active users as announced by the Head of Messenger David Marcus in a Blog post titled Here’s to 2016 with Messenger.
According to Nielsen stats, Facebook Messenger is the fastest Growing App on both Google android and Apple iOS, second only to Facebook’s App. They’ve been growing rapidly as well as can be seen from their monthly active user stats:
- 700 million in June 2015
- 600 million in March 2015
- 500 million in November 2014
That’s a lot of posting, chatting and messaging, amounting to some 10 billion photos per month. So what makes Facebook Messenger so unique that so many people are switching back to Facebook?
Facebook is reinventing IM – AI to make the phone number obsolete
Facebook Messenger has certainly come a long way since launch in August 2011 as noted in Facebook Messenger – The Mobile Messaging App to rule them all.
Back then it was touted as being the replacement for Blackberry Messenger, Google+, Hangouts and even Skype.
Now almost four (4) years later it’s finally beginning to live up to this promise. March 2015 saw Facebook introducing the ability to send and receive payments, a big achievement for Facebook Messenger, but still playing catchup to Snapchat.
In April 2015 Facebook Messenger finally got Video Calling and a Website based platform for those of us still totin’ a non-smartphone and used to a web interface on a desktop as detailed in Now Facebook has a Messenger website for your Desktop.
Facebook now has a virtual text based bot called the M virtual assistant that they rolled out in September 2015. This is really a chatbot which hands over the more difficult questions to humans.
Top down designed Chatbot heralds greater thing in the future, such as automated customer Service, the ability to answer voicemails in your phone or even a smartphone from Facebook.
Facebook Messenger is your Smartphone AI – Humans to become obsolete in 2016
Based on these changes and the blog post by Head of Messenger David Marcus, it’s clear that Facebook Messenger has plans to make Messenger your central communications hub.
Not only will it be more personalized with emojis, the new language of the Internet and threads, but business will find it easier to advertise and reach customers in a non-intrusive way via threads.
Artificial intelligence may also be added to the M virtual assistant. This trend towards chatbots is popular with other platforms, such as Kik and eventually Apple’s Siri Voice Assistant on iOS 9 to automate most functions like Voice Mail, Text messages and even answering Voice calls so that they don’t have to go to Voice Mail in the First place!
To quote Head of :Messenger David Marcus, Facebook Messenger plans to replace your smartphone or rather, the need to even answer it: “Our early tests in 2015 with brands are showing that interactions will happen more and more in your Messenger threads, so we’ll continue making it easy for you to engage with businesses. And we’ll also do more to enable additional businesses and services to build the right experience in conversations.”
Will Facebook Messenger achieve these lofty ideas for Facebook Messenger in 2016? Most likely, as IM on smartphones shows no sign of being replaced any time soon; they may soon replace the need to answer your smartphone altogether!
Here’s the link: