Facebook is celebrating the 10th birthday of its Messenger app with a collection of birthday-themed features and updates.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen tremendous growth and transformation, but our purpose has stayed the same: to help people stay closely connected to those who matter,” Vice President of Messaging Products, Loredana Crisan, wrote in a blog post.
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At the same time, Facebook revealed some of the app’s top trends during its lifetime.
In 2015, stickers on the Messenger app hit their peak in popularity. At the time, users were sending more than 200 million stickers on the app every day.
In 2018, users sent more than 80 million GIFs every day and in 2021, voice note messages hit an all-time high of 400 million worldwide daily.
What are the new features on Messenger?
To celebrate Messenger’s birthday, Facebook introduced a different version of the app’s Polls feature.
Poll Games will let users ask “Most likely to” questions and write their own using that starting phrase.
Users can play a poll game in group chats by clicking on “Polls” and selecting the “Most Likely To” option. There, they can pick a question and select group participants they want to include as potential answers.
In addition, app users can also apply a new Birthday chat theme and a curated “Messenger is 10!” sticker pack. The theme includes a birthday balloon 360-degree background and blow-out birthday candles with a birthday Augmented Reality (AR) effect.
They can also send a birthday song Soundmoji and use a confetti message effect.
Facebook has also added a new way for users to share their Facebook contacts with friends through Messenger.
To do so, they can select the contact they want to share and click “Share Contact” in the “More Actions” section.
Meanwhile, Messenger used the birthday celebrations to give users a sneak peek of a new feature called Word Effects.
Users can input and pair words with emojis that, when used in a conversation, will trigger a cascade of the same emoji.
Messenger will introduce Word Effects in an update soon.
Featured image: Facebook
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