I’m not saying anything new when I say that messaging platforms are a mess right now. iMessage rules the US mainland alongside Facebook Messenger. Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal all have a stable user base, but it's a very niche user base. Google is flailing as they attempt to make a prettier picture out of Allo. The state of messaging apps can be frustrating and confusing. Most do what I have been doing. They just use what their friends use. If your friends are like mine it's a mix of iMessage and Facebook Messenger. Naturally since iMessage is held within the castle walls of iOS, I’ve been using Facebook Messenger and at times have even grown fond of it.
Facebook Messenger as a messaging platform is great. It’s stable, has wide availability, and allows me to stay in constant contact with 99% of my friends. I’m sure most can agree that Facebook is not their favorite place on the internet. Filled with memes you’ve already seen, family friends discussing left from right, and that co-worker posting conspiracies. It can be a hard place to stomach. A place that I find myself visiting more often than my common sense can agree with.
All of these things eventually drive me away from Facebook. This brings me to Facebook Messengers greatest strength, messengers.com. A full fledged web app designed only for Facebook’s messaging component. A brilliant escape from the news feed/timeline.
When visiting the web app you are presented with a list of all of your conversations on the left. The conversation itself goes in the center and on the right is the home of any shared photos, customization options, and a link to the users profile. It’s so simple it makes my head hurt thinking that Facebook is the creator. To this day the messenger.com stays out of my way allowing me to talk with friends, share my favorite videos, change each threads color bubbles, set nicknames, have an audio/video chat from my PC, and even have a default emoji set for easy access to each individual conversation. There are other features as well including stickers, GIF, and other functions that have been placed to the right of the text box. They stay out of the way for the most part as I never see them until I need them, but I would be alright with an option to hide them when not in use. Mostly though messenger.com is pretty rad, right?
All this gloating brings me to the part that irks me. The part that has me trying to get my friends to switch to other platforms, even though I know they won’t. I get it. It’s annoying to switch platforms on a whim, but it’s also annoying when a company such as Facebook creates such a well designed and easy to use web app, only to ruin it with their mobile app.
Ads. It’s recently come out that Facebook's trial of running ads on the Messenger mobile app in Thailand and Australia was rather successful. This means it’s coming to the US. I can usually move past ads in free services. Facebook itself has ads which make sense. Same goes for YouTube, Spotify, and countless other free services. The problem here is we are talking about a world where right below your conversation with mom is an ad for Domino's, because you ordered a pizza the night before. This is too much. Feed me these ads on Facebook itself, don’t throw them in my conversation lists or even worse, actually in my conversation!
The prospect of ads is not even the first and only straw to break for me. It started when Facebook added stories. They’ve since moved it to the Facebook app, but there is still a spot on my home page for Messenger that asks me to share my day. Right below that is a list of active users. An active users list seems really useless in the age of smartphones. Showing a green dot next to a user’s profile picture is enough. Though what makes an active users list more infuriating is that there is a separate tab for it already in the home page. That’s not all though. Right below that is a list of suggested people to add. Again, I would prefer this not take up space in my home page, especially when there is a contact list to the right of the home page. Just put this at the top in a horizontal row, if you must! Which not to beat it into the ground, but next to this is another list of active users! Why?!
I think I’ve reached the tipping point in this write up. I’ve already started looking at some alternatives. The most promising so far is Telegram. Telegram has a clean web and mobile app. You have to sign up with a phone number, which I dislike, but other users don’t need to know your phone number to find you. They just need your username, which I do like.
I’m not going to end this article saying that everyone should go sign up for Telegram and that Facebook Messenger is a terrible service. I feel I’ve entertained both the negative and positives of using Facebook Messenger enough in this write up to give you an idea of what will and won’t work for you. Considering how integrated my friends and I are with Facebook Messenger, I’ll probably weather the storm until my own social circle adapts a new standard. Or rather if they adapt a new standard. Here’s to many more years restlessly enjoying Facebook Messenger!
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