Los Angeles — Striving to keep its global audience engaged under one roof, popular social media networking site, Facebook, over the weekend revealed that it has been busy experimenting on their Messenger application for the Windows platform. The Palo Alto firm said that the Facebook messenger app for Windows 7 is in its final stages, already, and company disclosed in an official post that they have rolled out the ‘trial application’ to only a handful of their users for now.
Surprisingly, the latest Facebook app for Windows 7 is the only version of Microsoft’s operating system that would allow access to three essentiall Facebook features: Facebook Chat, the new Ticker feed, and of course notifications from your Facebook friends right from your Windows 7 desktop, with the application layered on the OS.
Facebook Messenger app for Windows 7 is a standalone app similar to the ones rolled out for mobile platforms including Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS and Google Android OS, by the way, there is no news as yet for Mac and Linux users.
However, what is distributed now, to a handful of users is the first version of the trial application, and while you are not logged onto the Facebook site, but are only surfing around the Internet, you can accomplish the following tasks:
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Chat and message with your friends on Facebook
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See the latest updates from your friends in ticker
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Get quick notifications about what is going on
We are experimenting with the first version of the app with a small group of people. Needless to say, even as people begin using the app, Facebook will be adding updates to it and as they do it, there will be incidents of outage and periods of instability as we make improvements, confirms Facebook.
Note: Messenger for Windows will automatically install updates.
Here is Facebook’s official description of the new software (typo corrected):
One interesting thing though, the social media giant said that the same privacy settings that a user has applied for their Facebook profile, will be applicable to the app, too.
The move is not surprising but rather signals that Facebook is targeting to cater to even more masses than ever with a dedicated desktop client for Windows 7, one of Microsoft’s most successful operating systems.
With a humongous followers around the globe, Facebook is looking to assess whether users are interested in using the social media network’s real-time features without having to keep a browser window open. The social networking giant is confident enough that it already plans to release a final version: “If you are not in the test group, you will be able to get the app once we roll it out to everyone.”
There are million of users who have Windows 7 running on their machines, and with a user base of more than 800 million users, Facebook is clearly hoping that users will leave Messenger for Windows on throughout the day, probably since most Facebook addicts already do so with their browser, hence, the new messenger client is set to find a place on most of these computers.
Still, the benefit of a desktop app is that it can use the operating system’s notification system to alert the user: a browser cannot do that, especially if you have Facebook open in an inactive tab. Besides, some other well-established contenders in this league include Yahoo, Google Plus and Skype, etc, but you already know that Yahoo did not succeed with its take on social networking arena, although Google Plus has just entered the arena but is continuing to grow, and Skype now, well, comes with Facebook integration.
Now, as Facebook is keenly promoting its IM client forward, it seems that more and more number of users will adopt Facebook as their primary choice for an IM client.