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We increasingly give preference to instant messengers, use traditional SMS correspondence less often and have begun to abandon the usual phone calls. The number of applications that allow you to instantly exchange short messages, photos, videos, and communicate via audio and video communication is growing every day.

One of them - Facebook Messenger[Download from App Store]. An application that is part of the social network of the same name and allows you to stay in touch with your friends, colleagues and acquaintances anywhere, at any time of the day.

The app's audience is more than 900 million people from all over the world. Today we'll talk about main features Facebook Messenger. Some you already knew, but some you will hear about for the first time.

1. Use without a Facebook profile

If you are an opponent of social networks, then you can safely use Facebook Messenger without being tied to a profile. When registering, just download the application from the App Store or go to Messenger.com and go through a short procedure to link to a phone number.

All your phone contacts using Messenger will also appear in the application menu.

2. Bots

Bots have been receiving a lot of attention lately. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that these automated assistants were the future, so they were quickly integrated into Messenger.

The brainchild of Facebook is still far from Telegram, but a number of developments already exist. Among the most popular active bots it is worth noting:

• CNN– allows you to stay up to date with the latest news (English)
• Poncho– will help you find out the weather in any city in the world automatically
• Sequel Stories– a bot that offers a number of exciting stories with illustrations and interactivity (English language)
• Dropbox– sending photos to your own cloud storage of a popular service

The full list of available bots can be viewed. To enable it, just use Searching for people and groups on the tab Recent, indicating the exact name of the bot.

3. Install add-ons and applications

You can easily integrate additional apps into the mobile version of Messenger. The collection includes over 40 different tools for processing multimedia content, working with files, additional emoticons and animations, and much, much more.

Where to find: in an open dialogue, tap on the icon with three dots. Scroll through the list and select the desired application by pressing Open. After installation from the App Store, you will be able to export content directly from the application to the messenger.

4. Games: Basketball

Messenger has two built-in games. One of them is primitive basketball, which will help pass the time. In order to fight with your interlocutor, send him an emoticon with a picture of a basketball.

To do this you will need to add a keyboard Emoji from the iOS menu: Settings -> General -> Keyboards -> Keyboards -> New keyboards.

After sending the basketball, click on the smiley face from the dialogue. A playing field with a basket will open. Set records and compete with your interlocutor.

5. Games: Chess

For big fans of the game Chess, there is an opportunity to play a game or two directly in dialogue mode. The virtual whiteboard will appear without additional installations or third-party applications.

How to turn it on: Enter a message in the dialog @fbchess play and send it to the person you are planning to start the game with. To move pieces, use the following rules:

Shape names: P – pawn, N – knight, K – king, Q – queen, R – rook, B – officer.

To move a figure, you need to specify: its name, the vertical coordinate (Latin letter a-h) on which the figure stands, and the coordinate to which the movement is planned.

Example: Pg4 – the pawn on square g2 will go to square g4;
Example 2: Ngf6 – the knight on square g8 will go to square f6;
Example 3: Ke2 – the king on cell e1 will go to cell e2 (the king and queen are unpaired pieces, so there is no need to indicate the vertical coordinate);
Example 4: Bfh3 – the officer from square f1 will go to square h3.

The figures hit each other automatically. To make a move Necessarily indicate @fbchess at the origin.

6. Changing the color scheme

Each dialogue can be edited according to your favorite color scheme. This is not done entirely obviously, but the settings are saved and each correspondence becomes unique.

How to do: Open a dialogue with the user and at the top of the screen click on the contact's name. Select Color and install any of the options you like.

Please note that color changes occur both in the dialogue on your device and on the device of your interlocutor.

7. Quickly add friends

Imagine a situation where you communicate with a person in person and decide: “Why not add each other” as friends on Facebook? In Messenger, everything is organized much simpler than simply entering a name and searching for users among millions of others.

How to quickly add a user: Ask a "potential friend" to open Messenger in a tab I and tap on the avatar. Take your smartphone and open a tab People. Select an item Scan QR and point your smartphone camera at your friend’s screen by scanning the proposed code. The user will be found immediately.

8. “Invisible” correspondence requests

In an effort to protect users from unwanted spam, Facebook has enabled filtering for messages from users who are not your friends or are not found in your Messenger contact book. As a result, it will not be easy to reach you, and if one day they ask you: “I wrote to you, why don’t you answer?” - do not be surprised.

Open Settings - People and select Correspondence requests. Open category Filtered requests. We talked about this situation in more detail in the corresponding instructions:).

9. Hide messages

It’s unlikely that you like someone reading your correspondence while looking over your shoulder. Messenger has a feature to hide message previews and notifications.

How to turn it on: Open Settings - Notifications and turn off the slider next to the item Open preview.

10. Big Like

The branded logo-button Like is built into Messenger by default and displayed on the quick access panel. The application provides the ability to send a thumbs up, which is suitable for those cases when you are not just doing well, but great.

How to send: Touch and hold the finger icon for a few seconds. As long as you hold it, it will increase. The main thing is to stop in time :)

11. Group calls

This feature is only a few weeks old. In mid-April, Facebook announced . Now you can organize real conferences with several users at once. The maximum number of people participating in such an audio conference is 50.

How to call multiple people: Open a tab Groups and select A new group. Add the people you plan to call and press the key Call. The created group will be saved.

12. Nicknames

On the social network Facebook, all users look a little official: last name, first name... This is not very acceptable for everyday correspondence. Andrey Viktorovich can be easily changed to "Boxer", A Anna Anatolyevna on "Accountant".

Where to do it: Open a dialog with the user and tap on their name at the top of the screen. Select an item Nicknames and give any name with which you associate a specific person.

be careful– once you install Nickname, the interlocutor will see it in the dialogue.

Facebook is gradually closing down the mobile web version, and soon users of the social network will have to install a separate application for communication on their smartphones. But why are Zuckerberg and company doing this?

Facebook is forcing mobile site users who want to use chat to install a separate Messenger app, just as it already does for Andriod and iOS.

The Facebook app for Android and iOS began recommending that people install Facebook's Messenger in August 2014. Some users switched to using the mobile version of the Facebook site through a browser, where chat was still available, but this workaround is now also no longer available. Facebook is encouraging users to install the Messenger app and warning that it will soon be their only option.

Facebook is eliminating chat from its mobile app, and there's nothing you can do about it. Photo: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian

For the same reason, Facebook bought WhatsApp. On the one hand, a standalone app would compete directly with Facebook Messenger and Facebook's most basic features. But at the same time, it is aimed at people who are not interested in Facebook. The audience overlap between WhatsApp and Facebook is likely very high in the West, but outside the developed world many people who are not on Facebook use WhatsApp.

Facebook also has Instagram, which isn't too far removed from Facebook, but started life as a separate photo-sharing social network and has only recently gained greater integration with Facebook.

It's still a standalone app, meaning you don't have to be linked to Facebook to use Instagram. This means that this service can attract users who do not want to register with Facebook, but want to share photos.

Messenger is the hardest app to sell as a separate app from Facebook, but last June the company added the ability to sign up and use Messenger with just a phone number. This means that people who don't need a Facebook account can chat with friends who are on Facebook. And Facebook gets another phone number and the ability to collect personal information about one more person.

Collect users from everywhere

For Facebook, the more users the better. Photo: Andre Penner/AP

Chat apps are only as good as the number of users they have. Facebook Messenger is supposed to be the chat app for Facebook and their site's billion users, but for now it acts as a gateway to the world of Facebook for those hesitant to join the social network.

Facebook's ultimate goal is to reach as many people as possible in every possible way. The company's strategy across platforms is well thought out, as it always has a few trump cards remaining. After stopping using Facebook, people can continue using WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram. At the same time, Messenger users will likely be more inclined to click the button and create a full Facebook account.

In order to get the most out of Messenger and turn it into a service you can't live without, Facebook makes it imperative that as many users as possible are logged in and using the dedicated app, which is why they rule out other ways to access chat. Since they started doing this, the number of Messenger users has jumped from 200 million to 900 million in two years.

If Facebook can convince every one of its 1.09 billion active users to install Messenger, they will have a potentially powerful third platform alongside the social network and WhatsApp, which is also constantly expanding its global presence.

In this case, Facebook will be able to use Messenger for more than just chat. The creation of artificial intelligence and chatbots is a good example, but newsletters, shopping and voice calls may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Facebook messenger was created for users of one of the most popular social networks in the world, Facebook.

This is a completely standard messenger - a program that allows you to exchange messages with your friends, just as it happens with SMS correspondence.

The main advantage of this approach is that you don’t need to go to the site itself; you can just go in, select a friend and start a dialogue with him.

Other advantages of Facebook messenger are as follows:

• You can call and write messages for free, you only need Internet access;
• There are group chats;
• It is possible to see the last time someone from your contact list logged in;
• You can also see whether the person has read the message sent to them;
• The geolocation function allows you to find out which friends are nearby;
• You can create groups.

However, almost all of the above is available in any messenger for social networks.

What makes Facebook messenger different is that you don’t have to be registered on Facebook to use it—to log in, you just need to enter your phone number and come up with a password.

After this, the program itself will find the contacts of possible friends by their phone numbers and Facebook pages.

Facebook messenger has one big drawback - the lack of video calls. It is quite possible that the developers will soon try to add this feature.

About installation on PC

Facebook messenger has three versions:

1. For PC (a program that can be installed).
2. For Mozilla Firefox (a simple browser add-on).
3. For mobile phones on Android, iOS and BlackBerry OS.

Let's start with how to install Facebook messenger on Windows. First you need to download it. To do this you need to go to this page. The download will start automatically.

After that, you need to go to the downloads folder and click on the downloaded shortcut there.

In Opera, for example, all this is done easier - there is a downloads icon (circled in red in the figure below) and after clicking on it, a list of previously downloaded files appears.

Click on the downloaded file in this list and the installation begins.

Clue! The PC version of Facebook messenger failed back in 2014, so it is not supported now and there is no point in downloading it. You can only launch it in a roundabout way, but it won’t work for long (as experience has shown), so it’s better not to even try.

Installation in browser

As for installation on Mozilla Firefox, to do this you need to find this program in the application store and click the “Install” button.

To find Facebook messenger in the Mozilla store, you need to enter the name of the add-on in the search bar (it is underlined in yellow), and then find it in the resulting list of applications (usually the very first one).

Reminder! To go to the Mozilla Firefox application store, you need to click on the settings icon (circled in orange in the photo below) and click on the “Add-ons” button (circled in blue).

Installation on mobile phone

Installation on telephone operating systems is also not very difficult.

For example, to download Facebook messenger on Android, you need to go to the page of Google Play, Play Market and similar services, enter “Facebook messenger” in the search bar and find this program there.

On the page with the messenger there will be a big beautiful “Install” button. After clicking on it, the download and installation will begin automatically.

After completion, all that remains is to launch the application itself.

general information

After installing the program on Mozilla Firefox, an add-on icon will appear in the corner of the program (in the photo below it is highlighted in red).

On mobile phones, you just need to find the installed messenger in the list of applications and launch it.

After launch, you are prompted to enter your Facebook login and password.

The chat itself looks quite normal, there is nothing special about it.

At the bottom there is an icon with emoticons (highlighted in lilac in the figure), and the message is entered into one single window available for entry (underlined in red and indicated by arrows).

There is a button that allows you to upload something to the chat window - a picture, video or any other document (highlighted in blue).

The program has only three sections - past conversations, friends and settings.

When you go to the first section (it is highlighted in red in the photo above), a list of past conversations appears.

Time of the last message and its text.

The second section simply displays all friends. They are divided into two categories here: all and those that are active (to put it simply, those who are currently online).

You can switch to active friends by clicking on the corresponding button (highlighted with a black oval in the photo).

Search is available in the same window (highlighted with a red oval). It's very easy to use - just click on it and the keyboard will appear.

After that, enter the friend’s name and click “OK”.

There is nothing special in the settings - you can configure some interface elements, the process of notifying about incoming messages and other standard points.

By the way, the browser version doesn’t have all this. There is only a message window - enter the contact’s name and write a message. This completes the process of using Facebook messenger.

New applications are released on phones regularly. Especially recently, this applies to instant messengers, which are widely used for communication at a distance. And as everyone knows, working with any program can be greatly simplified if you configure it correctly. This also applies to Facebook Messenger. New users often have questions: “How to set up messenger on Facebook?”. We will look at the first launch first, and then this aspect.

First start

We will talk about the mobile version, since it is the most popular. The installation details are outlined. So we'll go straight to the first launch.

First, the user will be asked to log in to an existing Facebook profile or through a phone number. People don’t have any problems here. Once the preliminary stage is completed, the category will be displayed "Messages". All your chats are displayed here. But the last tab is more interesting. Go to it and select "All contacts". Here you will see all the people who are in your phone book and at the same time registered in the messenger. To start communicating with a specific person, tap on the desired line. A chat window will immediately appear, which also contains buttons to start a call (voice or video).

These are the most important points you should know about how to use Facebook messenger. Now let's take a closer look at the nuances of setting up the application.

Settings

To get to the main menu of options, just tap on the profile icon in any of the messenger tabs. A window will open with many items, the purpose of which can be easily understood by their name. But let’s still go over each of them.

Friends, many of you use iMessage in everyday life, but they don’t even notice it! Naturally, I'm talking about SMS - if the message to the recipient is displayed in blue, then iMessage has come into play! Now I will tell you how to set up iMessage correctly so that there is no confusion in correspondence!

Not everyone, alas, has correctly configured this wonderful service (which, as it turns out, can still be configured incorrectly), and I very often end up with the “wrong” users :) The thing is that I write a message to someone, and it goes away in green (although I’m sure that the subscriber has an iGadget), that is, an SMS, but in response I receive a message from an e-mail address unknown to me, with an answer. Is there a catch here somewhere - and many people can notice it? Now I will try to tell you how to make communication more comfortable.

How to set up iMessage correctly

First, we need to go to Settings - Messages on the iPhone and check there that iMessage is turned on at all. Next, if we are setting up an iPhone and not an iPad/iPod, we need to look into Send/Receive menu and make sure that the addresses are connected: phone number and iCloud account.

Scrolling down the list a little lower we see the item Start a new conversation with- and this is where you can choose where messages will be sent from - phone numbers or from mail! The fact is that depending on when iMessage was activated - before or after entering your iCloud account, there may be different options! Unfortunately, many people may have an e-mail address by default, which interferes with receiving and receiving messages... In general, you need to tick off your phone number.

If for some strange reason you have a different number there (for example, from a different SIM card) or email, and your number is inactive, then you need to turn off iMessage and turn it on again - after that you can activate your current phone number. If suddenly this doesn’t help, then turn off iMessage, remove your SIM card and reinsert it again, then turn on “blue” messages - everything should work! 🙂

In the case of an iPad/iPod/Mac, in the settings, by default it will be your mail linked to iCloud, and then you can communicate with other iGadgets via “mail”.

If you have friends/colleagues/relatives who are experiencing this problem, help them set up iMessage correctly to simplify and reduce the cost of your conversations! 🙂