Facebook Messenger admits the app is too cluttered, promises to simplify in 2018

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The hardest thing for any company to do is admit they’ve messed up. Facebook’s vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, this week did just that as he admitted that Facebook Messenger has “become too cluttered,” after introducing a bunch of new features in the past couple of years. In a blog post announcing what to expect from Messenger in 2018, one of the goals for the company is too make the service simple again.
Facebook in the past two years picked up a habit of taking features from Snapchat and implementing it on its own products. Messenger got features like Messenger Day or Stories if you will, an AR camera with masks and stickers, Discover and Game sections among others. The list of new features got so big the Facebook had to add M Suggestions just to let people know about all the various things you can do. This is far from Messenger’s humble beginnings of simply being a messaging platform among Facebook friends and family. But the app has gotten so cluttered lately that Marcus feels it’s time to take a step or two back.
“Over the last two years, we built a lot of capabilities to find the features that continue to set us apart,” Marcus wrote in a blog. “A lot of them have found their product market fit; some haven’t. While we raced to build these new features, the app became too cluttered. Expect to see us invest in massively simplifying and streamlining Messenger this year.”
How the company plans to simplify things is still unclear, but it looks like some features that have not worked so well may be removed this year. It makes sense to remove some of the features that seem to work better for platforms like Instagram and Snapchat while keeping Messenger more basic for users to communicate, as was the case when it initially started off.
ALSO READ: Facebook Messenger Kids, a standalone app for children under 13 launched
Marcus in his post also teases some trends in Messenger you can look forward to this year including improved real-time communication so that friends and family can connect easier, especially during times of crisis. “At Messenger, we want to make sure you can celebrate a cousin's engagement from the other side of the world as well as make sure your friend is safe after a natural disaster.” This suggests that Messenger may see a deeper implementation with Facebook’s Safety Check.
Additionally, Messenger will add some more features to group chats, which kind of sounds counterproductive to its “simplification” process, but the company will likely keep that in mind to better serve the 1.3 billion people using the service. Marcus also expects visual messaging (videos, images, GIFs, stickers etc) to get even bigger this year. How this will happen is again not detailed as of now. How the company plans on keeping the Messenger simplified while adding just the right amount of new things is something that we’ll just have to wait and see

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