By: Aseem Gaurav on August 11, 2011
Social networking giant Facebook has come out with Messenger for mobiles, a new group chat app for the iPhone, along with some other Android and BlackBerry phones, in the US market.
The app integrates Facebook contacts with phone contacts and lets members of the site send SMS text messages, emails and Facebook messages all in one place. The company says the idea is to offer a one-stop shop for all instant messaging, whether users have a contact's phone number or Facebook link, and make messaging faster.
The app delivers messages through push notifications to those with the app, and SMS, Facebook Chat, or Facebook Messages to those without it.
It is quite similar to Blackberry’s hugely popular Messenger service (BBM) which allows messaging between BlackBerry users. With this launch, Facebook hopes to take away some of the marketshare of BBM.
What makes the app so special is that it leverages their Facebook networks as the social networking site is seen as a source of data of your friends. So if you want to text an old friend but don’t have his phone number, you can simply send him a Facebook message. For this all you have to do is type the person's name.
Also users can easily start a group conversation when they’re on the go and send message to everyone at once in the group. By adding location the friends in the group can easily find their locations on the map.
