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Messenger’s New Feature: Photo Magic Will Remind You To Send Friends Their Photos

by Milicent Atieno
Messenger’s New Feature: Photo Magic Will Remind You To Send Friends Their Photos

Remember those moments you took out your phone and took selfies or snapshots of yourself and friends? Then months later when you are scrolling through your photo album on your phone you remember you were supposed to send it to them, but you forgot?

Well, Facebook wants to come to your rescue, given you are too busy and too lazy to remember simple things like sending your friends pictures you took of them. Facebook’s Messenger is conducting a dry run on a new feature dubbed Photo Magic, that will scan your most recent picture and using facial recognition software remind you to send specific pictures to Facebook contacts that meet the match.

The social network is currently testing Photo Magic in Australia for Android devices and will be doing the same on iOS devices in a week’s time. Should the dry run prove successful, Facebook will roll out Photo Magic to all Messenger users in the US soon then the rest of the globe.Messenger’s New Feature: Photo Magic Will Remind You To Send Friends Their Photos

What we’ve seen is that private sending of photos in Messenger is really popular. About 9.5 billion photos were sent inside Messenger in the last month,” said Peter Martinazzi, the Director of Product Management. “It’s growing even faster than Messenger overall, which is growing really fast.”

Facebook is very keen to make its Messenger platform more user-friendly given, it is the social network’s platform that gives its rival Snapchat a fierce run for its money. Facebook has employed the same facial recognition technology it uses in its photo tag suggestions and standalone Moments app in the new Photo Magic feature.

Users who would not like to use this feature will have the option of opting out using the same privacy control menu that turns off tag suggestions. If a user chooses to leave the feature on, Photo Magic could spark off conversation using recently taken photos that feature your Facebook contacts.

The end goal being, Facebook wants to draw you into frequently using its Messenger app and using the SMS, Snapchat and other competing platforms less often (if at all). All these will be geared towards locking you into the Facebook ecosystem, and you end up using the main app where you get to see News Feed and the ads on the social network.

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