Facebook last week announced that it had rolled out group calling worldwide in its Messenger app. Members engaged in a group conversation can tap the phone icon on their screen to initiate a group
call. They can manage individual participants on the next screen.
Members of a group who miss the initial call can tap the phone icon in the group chat to join the call while it's in progress.
The feature allows up to 50 participants and is available only in the latest version of Messenger.
Move Over, Phone Carriers
The announcement likely will cause concern among telecommunications companies because "if you consider that social media's a form of asynchronous communication, then Facebook is the largest telecom on the planet, with about 1.3 billion subscribers," observed Michael Jude, program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.
"Now add synchronous communications -- that is, communications in real time -- and Facebook's beginning to come into focus as the next paradigm of communications: async and sync combined," he told TechNewsWorld. "This could be a game changer."
Messaging apps Viber and Line already offer group calling for up to 200 people.
However, "Facebook is different -- it's a social media site with a huge following that now offers direct communication to groups of people," Jude said. "Viber and Line are much smaller pools of people and don't have the rich social media capabilities that Facebook does."
The calling feature is in software, so "if Facebook sees a need to expand the scope of the service, they could probably do it by flipping a switch," he noted.
Facebook stands to gain "a substantial portion of the millennial telecom business," Jude suggested.
Further, the company launched a beta of its Messenger Platform with bots and its Send/Receive API, as well as bots for the Messenger Platform. How those features will play into group calling remains to be seen.
0 comments: