Facebook’s New Pivot
Facebook went live yesterday and it was from Mark Zuckerberg’s home (I assume so). He went on to talk about how he is developing something new in terms of video calling and video rooms. It was interesting, the stuff he spoke about made sense and caught me thinking “What if this is to make it more compelling for us to use their services more often?” I guess that was the thought we should be left upon and to think about it for ourselves.
The center of all this announcement is Facebook’s core messaging app: Messenger and WhatsApp. Both apps are popular among all ages and serve different purposes too. Messenger makes it so easy for us to keep in touch with our Facebook friends and WhatsApp has created a personal touch of communicating with our loved ones and our close friends too. Instagram’s direct messaging is awesome too but it does not boast some of the features that make Messenger and WhatsApp more useful and used by more people. We can all have a good chat about which messaging app and service is better over the other but not today is not the day.
So what is new from Facebook? Video calling and rooms. This isn’t entirely new but there are upgrades to ‘em. Starting with video calling, WhatsApp will now allow up to 8 users to call up right away which is great and much needed (I know some have complained about the limitation). Video rooms, this is actually being talked more about by many and it defintely deserves to be talked about. Messenger is the main service that will be the backbone of this upcoming feature.
The way it works is pretty simple: create a room in Messenger or Facebook and invite anyone to join the call. That’s it! Anyone can join it as long there is a link, up to 50 people can join and no time limit as well, also it works with any Facebook service such as WhatsApp & Instagram too. Pretty cool ayyy?
Here are my thoughts: it is pretty cool to see Facebook to do something that is more personal and something needed for the time we are in. There is definitely the underlying privacy issues among Facebook and its apps. But if you can give them a second chance, you might be able to see a different picture. I have a feeling that Facebook will be able to pull it off. This is part of their new pivot to privacy and I am supporting it despite being a critic of Facebook because I always care about communication and privacy. As long as Facebook does it in a way that does not spring the old privacy issues then it should be fine for us.
