Messenger Rooms Unite Facebook’s Platforms Under One Umbrella As WhatsApp Welcomes A New Feature!

During this heavy time when everybody is staying at home and zoom has become super popular and other video conferencing technologies and it seems as though Mark Zuckerberg had been sitting on the side and thinking “how can I get involved in that?” This huge time of pandemic has led to a rise in the use of video conferencing app and to fight with the likes of Zoom, Skype and Google duo, Facebook has launched something called messenger rooms and lets you add up to 50 members in a single video call. And now soon after it’s launched there is news that this feature will be integrated into one of the biggest texting platforms in the – WhatsApp. And that’s how we have today’s Facebook messenger room which was launched just a few weeks ago. Facebook messenger rooms are going to be very similar to zoom and Skype and it could be a really great option for people out there who work online maybe you are teaching online, you’re doing some type of classes or meetings online. Now there are several pros and cons of messenger rooms from what we know so far.

The first important thing to know is that it is free. This is very important because with the zoom of course as you know on zoom you have a 40 minute limit for group calls, for the free option but with Facebook messenger rooms apparently will be unlimited. So you don’t have to worry about that. If you have a long meeting for several hours that sounds tiring but it will be free. Another advantage of messenger rooms is that, in the same way as zoom, you can send a link to people who want to join and anybody can join. They don’t need to have any software, even people who don’t have Facebook or Instagram, they can join.

An important thing Facebook wanted to focus on with this software is privacy. There’s been a lot of negative publicity about the zoom and the privacy issues that they’ve faced and Facebook has apparently been really working hard to make privacy an important feature and one feature they will have to help improve the privacy is- you will have the option to lock a room after the meeting has started and if you lock the room then nobody will be able to enter after that, they will only be able to leave. Nobody will be able to join after you’ve locked the room. A big advantage of messenger rooms is how easy it will be to create room so all you will need is a Facebook messenger and how many people have messenger? Well, that’s a lot right! Over a billion people have Facebook messenger so that’s a lot of people who can very easily just start a room and now, you will be able to start meetings in WhatsApp and hopefully, in future, even Instagram will have access to it.

Another pro of messenger rooms- if you can call this a pro- is that you will be able to use filters and emojis and all that kind of stuff that you can’t use on zoom. So if you would like to give yourself glasses or a crown or whatever it is that people do with filters, you can do that and maybe that could be a nice way to make the meetings a little more fun or a little bit more lighthearted but there are also some limitations with the messenger. As we all know how teachers love using a whiteboard on zoom which is a fantastic feature and as far as we can see from Facebook messenger rooms you won’t have any type of whiteboard and even sharing the screen is not going to be as nice as on zoom. Basically, you will have the option to share your camera or your screen not like on zoom or skype where you can have both at the same time so that’s a bit of a limitation hopefully they will improve on that in the future and maybe a workaround for that could be if you use a virtual camera with messenger rooms will allow, so a virtual camera will be where you use some other software and you can do a presentation with your face and then bring that in as one kind of virtual webcam in messenger rooms and then you can still do a class so that could work especially as zoom apparently is taking away that feature for having virtual cameras. 

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has come up with a new feature with which you can easily connect with 50 people through video calls. As we all know how Facebook and WhatsApp are becoming more enhanced day by day and one by one. And this feature as well was first launched as Facebook messenger rooms. And now this same messenger room has come to WhatsApp. But as we already know that zoom was the first and most popular video conference app out there and messenger rooms have been giving it a hard time to survive, now mark Zuckerberg wanted to extend his territory to his WhatsApp network. They have created an option of messenger rooms on WhatsApp. Currently, WhatsApp allows you to add up to 8 participants in a single call but that is now changed as Facebook created messenger rooms with WhatsApp. According to the report, this new feature has made its way to beta testing and has now been added to the list of its new features. This option is seen on the same menu where the locations and documents are placed. Additionally, when you go to calls stab on the WhatsApp you can see a create the room option. We will still be directed to the messenger app to continue using the group calling feature even with WhatsApp. This could be a very smart way of increasing a download of Facebook’s messenger app.

To requirement of end to end encryption could perhaps be the main reason which is why Facebook is looking to get all it’s an app under one encryption family to allow seamless functioning. Google has merged all it’s a platform through google meet. Google has its branch classroom through which currently many teachers and universities are making the best use of this facility to monitor and tutor children. Since the Facebook giant has been making headlines for quite a while with its Jio deal and new features, Facebook is moving forward and trying to meet the needs of people from different professional categories. And this step in enhancing and extending his territories with its subunits and arrival of messenger rooms is indeed a big leap but there are still a lot of potentials for it to increase and it really is exciting to see how clashes within tech giants are bringing improvement and ease to our daily life.