How Facebook Messenger developed into a talk camera

A Picture is justified regardless of a thousand words… that nobody needs to sort on a small screen. Also, regardless of the possibility that you mashed in all that content, despite everything it’d lose the nuances of mockery or truthfulness. To express the full scope of feeling, informing applications must put us up close and personal regardless of our separation.

“We get a kick out of the chance to think about the camera as the new console,” Facebook Messenger item director Tony Leach lets me know. So nine months back, his group set out on a goal-oriented venture to rethink the billion-client talk application as an approach to share pictures, not simply words.

That is showed as a shade catch on the Messenger home screen, more than 5,000 graphical channels and stickers you can add to photographs and recordings and PC produced workmanship that transforms any content into an overlaid representation. Detachment even has its own Stories highlight called Messenger Day, which, while as of now just accessible in a couple of nations, is slated to take off more extensive soon, incorporating into the U.S.

Detachment Day and that “camera as console” quote ought to be extremely well known. The component is another understanding of the Stories slideshow arrange Snapchat spearheaded. What’s more, in Snap’s IPO recording, it portrayed its theory, saying, “In the way that the glimmering cursor turned into the beginning stage for most items on desktop PCs, we trust that the camera screen will be the beginning stage for most items on cell phones.”

In any case, similarly as we don’t at present call each algorithmically sorted nourish a Facebook copycat, nor each visit benefit an ICQ clone, visual correspondence is greater than just Snapchat. Regardless of who promoted it, any informing application that doesn’t grasp the idea is damned.

Getting visual, pixel by pixel

Messenger first dipped its toes into the world of visual communication with the addition of Stickers in 2013. At the time, the company was actually reluctant to build the feature, according to a source familiar with the development process. Facebook’s leadership assumed Stickers were just a silly toy for kids and their popularity in Asia wouldn’t translate to the West.


Facebook’s Stickered app

Surprise! Stickers were a hit. But they only appeared on the blank white background of your messaging threads. By 2014, Snapchat had proven the popularity of overlaying text, emoji and drawing atop photos and videos. This collage style allowed people to not only show how they felt or what they were doing, but embellish and riff on it. Combining images, text and symbols let people deliver a vivid yet nuanced idea instantly, opening up new opportunities for comedy.

It was then in mid-2014 that Facebook got serious about the business of cloning. It launched an overly complicated Snapchat clone called Slingshot, added a selfie camera plus text and drawing overlays to Messenger and launched a dedicated standalone app called Stickered for adorning photos. Again, visual communication was a hit. Messenger’s growth spiked, increasing from 200 million to 500 million users in just seven months.



Messenger then finally diverged from the Snapchat playbook in 2015 by launching a developer platform to let you share GIFs, augmented photos and video clips via apps like Giphy, PingTank and ESPN. Facebook realized that not all users are creative enough to dream up their own imagery, so offering ways to pipe them in made visual communication more accessible.

Meanwhile, Messenger simplified photo sharing by using facial recognition to help you send friends your shots of them. And it actually started putting users face-to-face with video calling. Messenger’s meteoric rise continued as it added one hundred million more active users every few months.


Facebook Messenger’s video calling, Photo Magic, and content app platform (from left)

But its cornucopia of visual communications features all felt bolted on and buried within Messenger. They were essentially camera stop-gaps for an app born out of the group text chat era. It wasn’t clear what to do next, and Messenger spent the first half of 2016 mired focusing on chatbots that never quite worked right.

As scary as it would be to move a billion people’s furniture, Facebook needed to fundamentally overhaul its interface to put the camera at the core of Messenger.

Centering the camera

“The camera is a great way to initiate a conversation or share a moment that you want people to comment on,” Marcus tells me. That’s why it couldn’t be tucked away inside of chat threads. When you send text messages, you typically think of who you’re going to talk to first. But with visual communication, it’s the spontaneous moment you want to capture or the silly face you want to make that sparks the sharing process.

So in mid-December, Messenger launched its big redesign. The top corners of the inbox became rounded to clue users into the idea that they were always a swipe away from the camera, that now sat beneath the rest of the chrome. And a big transparent shutter button was overlaid in the middle of the navigation bar at the bottom. The camera literally became the center of the app after years in the periphery.



But instead of just porting a stock camera into the app, Marcus tells me, “We’ve done it in a way that is very much in line with the types of things you do with messaging.”

Once you take a photo or video, you can select from more than 5,000 graphics to add on top, and these are themed and categorized around the most popular questions and statements people share in Messenger. There are graphics for “Hungry?”, “Wanna hang?”, “On my way”, “Missing you” and more.

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Facebook

FOUNDED2004
OVERVIEWFacebook is an online social networking service that allows its users to connect with friends and family as well as make new connections. It provides its users with the ability to create a profile, update information, add images, send friend requests, and accept requests from other users. Its features include status update, photo tagging and sharing, and more. Facebook’s profile structure includes …
LOCATIONMenlo Park, CA
CATEGORIESInternet, Social Media, Social Network, Social
WEBSITEhttp://www.facebook.com
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These aren’t the kind of filters you find in Instagram for jazzing up art, or Snapchat for telling a story of what you’ve been doing. They’re designed for the present tense, like illustrated keyboard shortcuts.

This set of graphics is already having an impact in Messenger behavior. “Slowly but surely we’re seeing it used for conversation starters” that lead to more and longer chat sessions, Marcus tells me.



The artwork has been especially successful in prompting message threads around holidays like Valentine’s Day or Australia Day, when Facebook temporarily offers special filters with related iconography. Injecting these surprises keeps users checking back for new ways to share. Snapchat does the same with its rotating set of selfie lenses, but Messenger gives users an extra hint that there’s something to explore. It “gift wraps” the shutter button with the holiday’s theme to signal there are special filters available as soon as you open the app.

For those who are a bit camera-shy, Messenger integrated Snapchatty selfie masks thanks to Facebook’s acquisition of MSQRD. If you want to jazz up the background of your shots, you can add environmental filters that make your screen a lava lamp or add patterns you can manipulate with the wave of your hand. Messenger’s also got Prisma-esque “style transfer” filters that make your photos or videos look like line drawings or Picasso paintings.


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