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It’s the moment that at least a couple of people have been waiting for: Facebook’s messaging rooms have shrunk.
Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook post Thursday that Messenger Rooms, the social media response to Zoom, is now available to everyone in the US. USA, Canada and Mexico. The video chat feature will also be available globally “in the next week”.
Facebook first announced the feature in late April, but did not provide details on when it would be available other than “soon.” Props for Facebook engineers who clearly broke their butts to deliver this timely product.
Messenger Rooms works similarly to Zoom in as all you need is a URL, not an account, to join. You can link rooms to events or groups, just send them to a select group of people or post them for friends to “pass” to the Houseparty.
“You don’t need to schedule time to hang out like other video conferencing tools, it’s much more casual and fun,” writes Zuckerberg, like the totally normal, non-robot human he is.
Some additional advantages of using Rooms is that it shows participants in mosaic mode, it can host up to 50 people and there is no time limit (Zoom calls on free accounts have a time limit of 40 minutes). Also, in some countries where Facebook is the primary means of communication, the new video chat product could be a boon.
However, there are many reasons not to make Messenger Rooms your preferred video chat platform. Chief among them: It’s a product made by Facebook, a company with a notoriously terrible privacy record, with a core business of learning so much about you to help companies sell you things. You can take a closer look at all the privacy-oriented reasons why you’ll want to be skeptical of Messenger Rooms here.
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