Facebook reveals Messenger Rooms, an alternative to Zoom that gained huge popularity for video conferencing and chats the past few weeks by dint of the ongoing lockdown of COVID-19 pandemic in pretty much every part of the world.
Although video chatting itself is nothing new, Messenger had few restrictions including a number of users that can join the chat at a time and a need for a Facebook account to use it.
The Messenger Rooms allows a total of 50 users to join the video chat at a time and users don’t need a Facebook account but can join via a created link to the Room. And it doesn’t have any time limit whatsoever.
You get to play with AR effects and some new features such as immersive backgrounds and mood lighting. The creator of the room also gets to choose chat participants and the one(s) who can see the ongoing chat. It can also remove one or more from the chat at any time and even lock the room restricting any others. You can, however, yourself leave an ongoing chat if you want to. And if you make a room via a Facebook group, it’s by default open to other members in that group.
The rooms’ feature, though, is not end-to-end encrypted, considering it is a challenge to offer on a video calling among a large number of participants. But Facebook pledges to work upon it in the future. Meanwhile, the room content is encrypted in between the users and the Facebook servers. Facebook also vows upon the user privacy and states that it will not be putting its eyes and ears over any audio and video calls.
The Messenger Rooms will launch in few nations this week, while globally in the weeks to follow.
