Facebook Messenger And How It Can Blow Up Your iPhone

A new Android and iOS app called Facebook Messenger, has just been released and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Basically, Facebook has taken its messaging system, used their Beluga team to simplify it a bit, and pushed it out as an independent app. You can message your contacts without using up SMS (similar to things like BBM, Google+ Huddle, iMessage, GroupMe, Fast Society, and plenty of others,) and you can also create group messages on the fly as well.

Your messages will be seen by people show up in the Messenger app, their Facebook inbox, or by SMS if they don’t have the app installed. You can also share your GPS location and attach images to the message conversations as well. If you’ve used Beluga or Facebook, then you know how to use this.

Rich Harris says I was one of many folks whose smartphone was bombarded after installing the new Facebook Messenger app, a stand alone version of the Facebook messaging platform also included in the main Facebook application. To the dismay of many smartphone users including myself, my contacts on my phone in some cases were showing up in triplicate. For us geeks, nothing is more maddening that duplicate entries of anything, whether it be notifications, emails or contacts. I won’t go on and on about this as many people already are on their blogs but it does bring up a couple questions and again unearths some more of the immature development practices still prevalent at Facebook.