Facebook appears to be fully focused on monetizing its Messenger app. After adding a payment facility recently, the company plans one more update to the app. Facebook has its F8 Developer Conference scheduled to be held in San Francisco next week and has plans of opening up Messenger to third-party apps, says a report from Mashable by Karissa Bell.
Facebook beefs up Messenger
Citing a person familiar with the plans, the report states that as many as 20 third-party services will work on top of Messenger. The third-party apps will become functional once integration is rolled out. It is very possible that Facebook will want the capability to be expanded to more developers once the initial roll-out takes place, says the report. Over the last year, Messenger’s reach has been expanded vastly by the company, owing to a series of moves it has taken, and the upcoming update to Messenger is one of those.
In 2011, the social networking giant introduced Messenger as a standalone app. Last year, it made another major move of moving mobile messages out of the main Facebook app completely, thus forcing users to download the Messenger app, which led to agitation among a large number of users. However, since then, the Messenger app has been beefed up by Facebook rapidly, including the latest addition of making mobile payments.
Following Asian rivals
As of now, not much clarity is available on what the integration will look like and who the early partners are. The social network has a history of announcing new features at its F8 Developer Conference, which is generally used by firms to offer guidance through workshops and discuss new features with developers.
Once the service is opened up to third-party developers, Messenger will no longer serve as a supplement to the main services of Facebook. Rather, the move will make Messenger its own platform, says the report from Mashable. It is not very clear for now what could be the real motive of the company behind this step. However, if we look at the success of other messaging apps like Line and WeChat in Asia, which support third-party services, then the move does make sense.
