The new Facebook messenger rooms is fast becoming an alternative too Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. In this article, we’d cover the new Facebook Messenger Rooms & everything you need to know. According to Mark Zuckerberg during the announcement, the Facebook billionaire made us understand that the objective was to create a tool that’d bring people together during the pandemic.
Below are some of the key features and what to expect:
- Users can conference with up to 50 people at once
- There is no time limit on calls
- When you set up a new Messenger Room call, a notification will pop up on your friends’ and followers’ home page, so they can immediately jump in and join the call.
- You can invite your Instagram followers & whatsapp contacts
- Users can discover and join rooms, control who joins and sees the room and even use exploit augmented reality filters, backgrounds and lighting.
- Those with only limited data or a poor internet connection now have the option to listen to the audio only.
- Messenger Rooms can also be connected to your Facebook Events, making a group hangout just one click away for your event attendees.
- The host can lock the room to block people from joining via URL, and if they boot someone from a Room, it automatically locks until they unlock it. That ensures that if trolls find your link, they can’t just keep joining from the web.
- You don’t need a Facebook or Instagram profile to join
With several more features still being rolled out gradually, it might also interest you to know about the following updates in the works:
- Facebook Events will soon be set up with the function to charge an attendance fee
- Facebook Dating Video Chat – Rather than going on a date where you have no chemistry, you’ll be able to video chat with matches on Facebook Dating to get a feel for someone first.
- Live on IGTV – Long live videos won’t have to disappear since they can now be saved to IGTV, encouraging higher quality Instagram Lives meant to last
- Instagram Live on web – You can now watch Live videos and comment from desktop so you can multi-task during longer streams
- Live via audio only – With more musicians bringing their tours to Facebook Live, now you can listen while still going about your day when you can’t watch too or want to conserve data, and you can use a toll-free number to dial in to some Pages’ videos
- Donate button on live videos – This makes it much easier for musicians, activists, and normal people to raise money for causes during the corona-virus crisis
- Facebook Live With returns – It’s tough to be the center of attention for long periods, so being able to bring a guest on screen during Live calls keeps them interesting and low pressure
- Facebook will soon launch the ability to choose a virtual background to cover up what’s behind you on a video call, including 360 backgrounds that look different as you move around, plus mood lighting to make you look better on camera
With all these new and exciting features, I guess it is quite safe to say very soon humans shall actually live fully on Facebook! Looking through these updates, which is your favorite and which ones are you currently looking forward to? Please share your feed back and opinions in the comment section below.
