Update: A Facebook representative reached out to clarify that Messenger Day technically isn’t being discontinued but merged with Facebook Stories, with the combined entity being set to bear the name “Stories.” The new feature is also making its way to the Facebook Lite Android app, the company said. The original story is as follows.
The Messenger Day feature of Facebook’s popular chat app is now being phased out in favor of Facebook Stories, TechCrunch reported earlier this week, citing an interview with Facebook Product Manager Connor Hayes. The Menlo Park, California-based social media giant opted for its latest move following an extensive period of collecting and analyzing user feedback, with the company acknowledging that an unspecified portion of its user base already thought that Facebook Stories and Messenger Day are the same things. While those users would be wrong, it appears that Facebook is now seeking to streamline its ephemeral offerings in order to avoid any future confusion about its products.
Messenger Day is hence set to be discontinued just over eight months after being released on a global level and two months after surpassing 70 million daily active users. The development illustrates the volatility of Facebook’s product strategy which is prone to frequent and radical change, especially as the discontinuation of Messenger Day was confirmed alongside a number of other major alterations to the company’s digital offerings, most notably the fact that Facebook Direct is now set to be replaced with Messenger’s own platform. While Facebook Direct was primarily an ephemeral messaging platform, Messenger won’t debut any such features to mimic the functionality that’s now getting discontinued, at least not for the time being. Secret Conversations that Facebook introduced to Messenger last year can technically be used for having any correspondence disappear after a given period of time but only if you manually set that kind of behavior, with Facebook saying that the reason a regular Messenger chat is replacing Facebook Direct is that its representative user feedback suggests people prefer having their followers send reactions to Facebook Stories via Messenger instead of an entirely different platform.
Facebook Stories are now also expanding their presence to Facebook Groups and Pages looking to collaborate on creating them, the largest social media network on the planet said. All of the newly announced features are already rolling out on a worldwide level and should soon be delivered to your devices through a combination of automatic client-side and server-side updates. Facebook‘s erratic product development efforts are likely to continue going forward as the company continues experimenting with ways to boost its already massive user engagement and acquisition rates.