While Messenger has been arounds since April 2015, it doesn’t present anything particularly new from Skype, Hangouts, or Duo. In all these, you have the option of chatting via text, pictures, and videos.
Now, Facebook wants to bring differentiated factor, short bursts of live footage dubbed Instant Video in you chats. The purpose of this new feature is to enrich an ongoing text-based chat conversation. When you want to describe to your friends better what you are doing in that place and in that current moment.
“Sometimes you want to ask a friend’s opinion on a pair of shoes you want to buy, weigh in on what ice cream flavor they should bring home, or just want to see your BFF’s reaction to your witty message when you’re in a place where you can’t actually talk live.” Write Facebook on its blog page.
The Messenger app records about a billion users monthly, why its partner company WhatsApp also hit the billion-mark in February, 2016. However, those stats are just not sufficient enough for Facebook, they want to outpace Snapchat. Even if it means copying stuff from SnapChat and pasting it on their own platform, like the recently introduced Lifestage.