Facebook is splitting up Messenger and everything else again.
Got ya. Not exactly, but Facebook is spinning Messenger off into its own web app. Don’t worry, however, Facebook promises that it’s not going the strip chat functionality out of Facebook.com.
If you head on over to www.messenger.com you’ll find a completely standalone version of Facebook Messenger – one free of all the distractions of Facebook proper. There’s no News Feed, no ads, no ticker, and no big red notifications. Just Messages, blown up to size.
Why, you’re most certainly asking?
Well, a Facebook spokesperson told Re/code that it’s all about removing the distractions of Facebook proper. “Messenger.com is a way to keep messaging as the focus,” it said.
You might recall last year when Facebook split up its main app and Messenger, forcing everyone to download an entirely separate app just to chat via Facebook.
And you also probably recall Facebook’s laughable reasoning, which basically amounted to you had to download a standalone Facebook Messenger app because tapping one tab was too hard. let’s relive Zuckerberg’s words, just for fun:
We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.
The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.
That load of crap became apparent for what it was when Facebook made clear its plans to turn Messenger into its own platform and give developers carte blanche.
Like I said before, Facebook isn’t stripping messaging from Facebook.com. You’ll still be able to chat on the main site. But it’s likely that Facebook has the same focus of turning Desktop Messenger into its own platform (for payments, customer service, GIF battles, whatever).
Or the company is seriously concerned about your ability to weed out distractions.
