Facebook’s continued dominance over your personal messaging and audio calling space just got extended even further. After giving much sweat to telecom operators with the debut of audio calling to Whatsapp, Facebook’s homegrown Messenger too, is hitting big in that domain. Big to the extent, that it now has 300M users.
The announcement however, isn’t very surprising.
Facebook Messenger has a user-base of over a billion users. While that alone could disrupt any calling service or operating system, there’s more. The platform has a very large bandwidth of coverage– family, friends, colleagues whoever it might be, there’s a high chance that you’ll find them on Facebook Messenger. The chat app has also got a unique technology infrastructure that can support high-bandwidth transmissions.
The company’s history with voice calling dates back to three years ago when it first started experimenting with VoIP calls. Later, we saw the platform roll out video calling in the middle of last year, and finally, group calling hit Facebook Messenger in Q2, this year.
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Earlier this month, we saw the company’s latest effort in the communications sector. Facebook introduced a new and innovative way of connecting to your loved ones called Instant Video. This service allows users to transmit video to a receiver who can choose whether they want to join in the video chat or not. Users will also be able to toggle sound during this session.
Head of Messenger David Marcus told TechCrunch’s Josh Constine,
“There’s a new paradigm when we think of real-time communications. We had to catch up when we didn’t have voice and video conversations, Now out of the billion users, over 300 million are active users of audio and video calling. Apps that are supposed to do just that are much smaller than that.”
Apparently, Instant Video will be the feature that Facebook will be concentrating on for a while now. Seems like live connections is the new cool. At least according to Facebook.
