Facebook is rolling out a suite of new products to expand its capabilities in video chat. The company this week announced Messenger Rooms, a tool for starting virtual hangouts with up to 50 people and allowing friends to drop in on you whenever they like. It’s also doubling the capacity of video calls on WhatsApp from four people to eight, adding video calls to Facebook Dating, and adding new live-streaming features to both Facebook and Instagram.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the features in a live stream today. In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said the new video features were built in line with the company’s shift toward creating more private messaging tools.
“Video presence isn’t a new area for us,” he said. “But it’s an area that we want to go deeper in, and it fits the overall theme, which is that we’re shifting more resources in the company to focus on private communication and private social platforms, rather than just the traditional broader ones. So this is a good mix: we’re building tools into Facebook and Instagram that are helping people find smaller groups of people to then go have more intimate connections with, and be able to have private sessions with.”
The moves come as the global pandemic has forced hundreds of millions of people to stay indoors and rely on digital tools for nearly all of their work, school, and play. More than 700 million people are now making calls on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp every day.
But competitors are also surging. Zoom, which began life as a simple tool for business videoconferencing, rocketed from 10 million users in December to more than 300 million today. Houseparty, an app for virtual hangouts with friends that Facebook had previously cloned before abandoning the project last year, now routinely hovers at the top of app store download charts. It gained 50 million users over the past month.
The rapid growth of alternative social products has always been cause for concern at the famously paranoid Facebook, which devotes significant resources to monitoring emerging social products and then acquiring the companies behind them or copying their features. While we are still in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s already clear that consumer behavior is changing to cope with it — and that Facebook’s existing product lineup has not met demand.
Of everything announced this week, Messenger Rooms promises to be the most significant. The feature, which Facebook says will be available in the company’s products globally sometime in the next few weeks, will allow up to 50 people to join a call. The room’s creator can decide whether it’s open to all or lock it to prevent uninvited guests from joining. You’ll be able to start a room from Messenger and Facebook to start. Later, rooms will come to Instagram Direct, WhatsApp, and Portal. Guests can join a room regardless of whether they have a Facebook account.
We have seen the likes of Zoom surging in malicious behavior as it became the world’s default meeting app, with racist, bigoted, and pornographic “Zoombombings” roiling meetings all over the world. Zuckerberg said Messenger Rooms were designed with strong privacy controls, and that the feature’s reliance on connections with your real-life friends and family make it less likely that it will be used to harass people. For groups where people don’t know each other as well, moderators will be able to kick people out of rooms.
