Facebook To Introduce ‘Away Message’ For Mobile Phone
According to The Verge, Facebook will introduce this feature in the form of ‘sidebar status’ for the mobile app on both Android and iOS devices. The move is being interpreted as Facebook’s way of sprucing up the users mobile experience and hopefully attract back the teenagers; said to be exiting the platform in numbers significant enough to cause alarm.
The new feature will allow users to set up new ‘sidebar status’ with a small photo that can also be tagged to a location. Users will have to swipe right on their Facebook app; the section that normally shows frequently messaged friends will now display status messages under their names. The messages can also be accompanied by small pictures created by the company.
Users will only see these messages in the sidebar and not in the newsfeed or profile. Additionally a user gets to decide which one of his or her Facebook friends get to see their messages.
It is reported that the social network says: “It’s not quite right to call these ‘away’ messages, of course, because these days we’re never really ‘away’ in the way we were in the era of desktop computing. But sidebar statuses have the same look and feel, and they’re intended for the same audience that away messages were: your closest friends.”
The ‘away messages’ is just one of the new features the social network has introduced in the recent past. Following the revamping of its Messenger app into a more e-commerce ready platform, to the introduction of a dedicated web version of the Messenger; Facebook is aggressively on the charm campaign. We would not be surprised if Facebook did borrow features from WhatsApp to improve the customer experience on its platform.