The majority of the global population was locked in their homes during the brunt of the pandemic. Due to this, messaging and voice/video conferencing apps such as Messenger, Discord, Slack, Zoom, and others saw a monumental rise in usage rates. Increasing competition among these applications for loyal users has led to some innovative changes to one-up each other. However, there is no rule that forbids imitation of certain features. This is how the tech world evolves after all – it builds on what has already been developed in the past. That’s exactly what Facebook Messenger has done in implementing its “brand new” shortcuts.
Users of Messenger can now use shortcuts such as @Everyone and /Silent. The first shortcut aims to allow tagging of everyone in the group chat, with all members receiving a notification ping. This definitely beats having to tag everyone one-by-one like in the old days, especially when the group chat has more members than you can count. This seems to have been inspired by the feature which first found its way onto Discord.
Silent, on the other hand, does the opposite: it sends messages but doesn’t send notifications to anyone in the chat. This is to show respect to communities where members are from a different time zone and don’t put their mobile devices on silent. Another possible use is for work or professional chats: sometimes you want to send a message as a reminder for the following day, but don’t want your members to be disturbed as it’s past working hours.
Android and iOS Messenger users in the US get a little bit more though. A new feature called /Pay will expedite payment transfers between users of Messenger by automatically triggering payment methods between two parties. /GIF, /shrug, and /tableflip meanwhile are worldwide iOS-exclusive ways to express yourself a bit more with special emoji and media shortcuts.
We’re stoked to see how Messenger Shortcuts will evolve and what utilities can be further be drawn out of this new feature. We hope that /Pay is a success and makes its way to our local shores in the Philippines to make it easier to send and collect money.
