Facebook launches there own video conferencing feature "Messenger Room"

(Edited)/Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash

As people are working from home and as all the schools and colleges around the world have shut down for the foreseeable future, people turned to video calling to continue their work from home, many schools are conducting online classes and some are even conducting online exams and because of all these, video calling platforms have seen a sudden rise in users.

Now Facebook also started their own video calling feature called Messenger Room, Facebook users can start or join a group call right from the messenger app and did not require to download an additional app, video calling is not new to Facebook users but group calling has certainly had some restrictions.

But now Facebook through the Messenger Room will let you video call with up to 50 people all at once and it was a free service and will have no limitations in the amount of time you can participate in a group video call. Zoom app, a Chinese video conferencing app has faced a lot of criticism for it's failed privacy practices that let intruders interfere with a video call without the knowledge of the participants.

The reason many people started using Zoom even when they have long term alternatives like Skype and Microsoft Teams, etc. is that Zoom is easy to use and doesn't require a tech savvy's knowledge to start a video conference, Facebook is also going in that direction now, you don't even need to have a Facebook account to use this feature.

As it is easy to set up a group video call and the fact that it was free to use will definitely attract many users to use their new service because even Zoom has limitations if you're using the free version. Facebook has its fair share of privacy issues in the past and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that they have learned from the issues with other video conferencing platforms.

As usual, the room creator will have the ability to make the room locked or unlocked, where locked rooms can only be joined by the ones who have a link to the room, soon Facebook is trying to let people create rooms from its other social media platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. Along with this, WhatsApp video calls can now host up to eight people.