Facebook released instant messenger for iPhone and Android

Back in February, Facebook acquired a promising startup Beluga, which provided a service for group correspondence and was known for a team of three former Google employees. Then various assumptions were made about whether Facebook would launch a separate messenger (which was essentially Beluga), or whether it plans to integrate technology and the team into its recently updated Messaging product, introduced last fall.

Today we received the answer: Facebook released a separate Messenger application for iOS and Android, combining the best features of Beluga and Facebook messages. The application is available in the App Store and in the Android Market .

If you have used Beluga before, then the application will be very familiar to you. And if you didn’t use it, it should still seem quite familiar - because it’s very similar to the web interface of Facebook messages.
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Open the app, and you will immediately see a list of your latest conversations on Facebook. Since all the messages on Facebook are now combined within one platform, you will see both chat rooms and private messages there.

The main functions of the correspondence work quite expectedly: click on one of the existing conversations, and you can quickly write a message. And if one of your friends (or friends of friends) writes you a message when the application is not open, then you will immediately receive a notification.

You can easily create a group by entering the names of your friends - contacts are taken from both your Facebook friends list and your phone's address book. Messages to friends on Facebook, of course, are sent via Facebook messages, and messages sent to non-Facebook contacts are sent via SMS. And you can attach photos in a group chat.

Functions directly from Beluga are also present in the application. If your friends reveal their location, then you can see the location of the group members on the map. And if you need to rest for a couple of hours or until 8 am the next day, then you can turn off the messages for the required period. You can also turn off your friend completely if he annoys you.

This launch is notable for the fact that Facebook first released a separate mobile application for one of its products (historically, all mobile applications were called simply “Facebook” and included as much functionality as Facebook could cram into them). The new messenger may well pave the way for other offline applications, such as the Photos application, which, according to some testimonies, is in development.

via TechCrunch