[ad_1]
Throughout all the social distancing (and isolation) we’ve seen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom has emerged as a household name, while some people previously knew it better for being the video conferencing tool at work. As more and more people have been using it for everything but work-related purposes, it reached hundreds of millions of active users every day, and Facebook took notice.
The social network thus announced Messenger Rooms a few weeks ago, which is basically its response to the popularity of Zoom, although it points directly to consumer use cases (because there is no shared screen or other tools that would benefit the business configuration). Today, Messenger Rooms is starting to work.
We say “start” because right now we don’t have the functionality yet, even though it was supposedly activated globally, so clearly this is one of those organized releases. However, wait, it’s coming.
When you have it, you can create a room from Facebook (in North America) or Messenger (globally). You can have up to 50 people in a free video call, with no time limit. There is a host / guest system like Zoom, and you can invite people who don’t have a Facebook account (and won’t need to create one to join).
You can choose who can see and join your room, and remove people from it at any time, or even lock the room if you don’t want anyone else to join.
Source
