Facebook Announces New Messenger Features at F8 2017

Unlike previous years, the Facebook Messenger announcement isn’t related to the numbers but focused on the new things the social media giant is enabling in its most used platform. A year after opening the Messenger Platform to developers, Facebook sees the app that started as a chat platform as a social living room for the world, where “people can hang out, share, chat, play games or buy things, while still being able to reach nearly everyone, wherever they are.”

Facebook has been working on improving Messenger, and it came up with a list of features such as the Discover tab, a way to discover businesses you might be interested in. This feature is starting to roll out to a few people in the US today; so right the from the home screen, people can find their recently used bots, popular experiences and a free-form search field.

You may have already seen your parametric QR code in Messenger. With Messenger 2.0 the extended parametric QR code feature will allow people to find out more about — for example — an event from a bot for Messenger just by scanning the code in the Messenger camera.

M, the virtual assistant, has been improved: It is able to make suggestions in conversations, such as saying “thank you” with a fun sticker, remind you that you need to meet a friend, etc.

Businesses are also encouraged to use Messenger, and there are a few features developed for them, such as smart replies for Pages, parametric Messenger codes and hand-over protocol. This allows businesses to work with multiple developers for different experiences on Messenger.