Facebook Messenger now boasts 800 million monthly users

Facebook Messenger now boasts 800 million monthly users, a 100 million increase compared to six months ago.

Facebook vice president David Marcus announced the milestone on an official blog post on Thursday.

2015 was an important year for the development of the Messenger platform, the company said.

Notable improvement to Messenger last year included the introduction of video calling, the ability to customize conversations with colors, nicknames and emojis, and with Businesses on Messenger, the tech giant introduced a new way for businesses to engage their customers by providing them with a personal experience.

Source: Facebook

As for the future of the platform, Facebook wants Messenger to become the ‘go-to-place’ for users on their phone – where they can do everything in one place. Facebook announced last month that Uber rides could be booked directly via its Messenger app and this year the social media giant is expected to announc| a similar partnership with the airline KLM.

Markus said:

“We’re seeing a paradigm shift in how people engage. At Messenger we’re thinking about how we can help you interact with businesses or services to buy items, order rides, purchase airline tickets, and talk to customer service in truly frictionless and delightful ways. It is so much easier to do everything in one place that has the context of your last interactions, as well as your identity (no need to ever login), rather than downloading apps that you’ll never use again and jumping around from one app to another. Our early tests in 2015 with brands are showing that interactions will happen more and more in your Messenger threads, so we’ll continue making it easy for you to engage with businesses, and we’ll also do more to enable additional businesses and services to build the right experience in conversations.”

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Marcus also provided some information on ‘M’, Facebook’s AI-based virtual assistant:

“You can expect us to keep trying new things, too. Our test of M, our digital virtual assistant, powered by human-trained AI, is going well. It’s still very, very early days, but the growing AI capabilities are bringing unparalleled convenience to simple, every day tasks like booking a restaurant, sending flowers, and making plans. There will be more innovative developments to come from Messenger this year.”

Facebook currently has a huge presence in the messaging market, with two platforms near 1 billion users. WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for 19 billion, announced that it had more than 900 million users in September.