Facebook Groups: new chat feature announced today
Facebook is bringing Messenger into Groups with Chat for Groups, letting members join chat rooms of up to 250 people without being flooded with spam.
If you miss good old mIRC or MSN messages full of ancient emojis, we have good news for you: Facebook is planning to combine Groups and Messenger without flooding you with spam. From today (probably not yet in Portugal), the world's biggest social network will gradually let group members join sub-groups, which will work inside the chat and can have up to 250 members.
Audio and video calls can include up to 50 members at once. For example, imagine you belong to a group for dog owners. With this new feature, you can join a chat room (by starting a thread) just with English bulldog owners, or one for sharing tips on how to groom a poodle, posting photos of your four-legged friends growing up or arranging to meet in the park. The new Chat for Groups will make forums more engaging, with real-time sharing, to build loyalty to one of the most siloed features of Mark Zuckerberg's platform.
But instead of alerting you straight away when there is a new message in the thread, you will first get a notification from the group inviting you to opt in to further notifications. If you miss the first alert, you can always go to the new chat tab to see all active conversations or start a new one. And if a group chat gets overwhelming, you can turn off notifications for message reactions or Messenger games, or choose to be notified only when someone mentions you in the conversation (with the @ symbol before your name). To fight spam, group admins can make a conversation inactive or limit posting to admins only.
Facebook has been looking for the best way to bring Messenger into groups for some time. Events already had a chat room for 250 members and, in 2016, the standalone app tested public discussions with "Rooms". Now this new feature will extend the existing Groups. With the news feed becoming ever more politically combative, and the algorithm favouring general content that appeals to as many people as possible, there is little room left for niche content on Facebook. That is why rival apps such as Telegram have seen activity soar, and WhatsApp itself revamped its chat rooms with more admin tools back in May this year.
With more than 1.4 billion monthly active users across tens of millions of active groups, this new feature will generate much more activity and return for Facebook. With it, members can plan events, arrange to meet in person or have deeper discussions. Sending even more messages could also help the social network reach its goal of having a billion users in what it calls "meaningful groups", after announcing in the middle of the year that it already had 200 million at that level. After the many scandals that have hurt its reputation, and with more and more voices accusing it of polarising people, the Californian company is keener than ever to find new ways to prove that it actually brings people together rather than driving them apart.
