Facebook Messenger is an app for Android (and iOS) that allows you to contact your friends through mobile IM, Facebook Chat, and SMS. Other features of the app include group chat, push notifications, and the ability to share photos or your location.

The first thing you will notice after downloading the app is that if you have the official Facebook app, you will not need to log in separately, Facebook Messenger sees that you are logged in already.

Login and Contact List

After logging in, you will see a list of any messages and chat conversations you have held on Facebook. With Facebook new web-based messaging, there is no longer differentiation between chat and messages. They are all considered messages. From Messenger, you can continue the conversation through either of these.

Simply press one of the conversations in the list to go to the chat screen for that conversation. From here you wull see the most recent messages, a way to send text, images, and your location, and a settings button unique to that particular conversation. This screen, as well as the app overall, is really well designed and very clean.

Single Chat and Settings

Pressing the Settings button for a single conversation will allow you to manage alerts for that conversation and add more people. For the alerts, you can choose from On, Off for 1 Hour, Off Until 8am, and Off. I think this was a pretty nice touch by the people at Facebook, I would imagine a frequent request for this young app is the ability to specify a time to turn alerts back on. I would definitely like to see that.

On top of alerts and adding people, you can also view a map of locations posted by the participants.

Map Screen

You can also start new conversations using the icon in the top right corner of the home screen. Since we already saw how a one-on-one chat works, let’s take a look a group chats.

Group Chat

When adding people to a conversation, start typing in a name and Facebook Messenger will suggest people that either have Messenger (and are logged in) or people from your contacts list (offline), who get added as SMS recipients, its worth noting that you can mix and match chat and SMS recipients. There is no advertised limit to the number of people you can add, but I am sure as the number grows you’ll see some performance issues.

Group Chat and Settings

When you send a message to a group of mixed recipients, Facebook handles sending everything out as well as displaying incoming messages all in one place. It doesn’t rely on your phone SMS app at all, so you will not see a list of text messages next time you open up Android Messaging app. Whats really cool is Messenger will also send incoming SMS messages to the other SMS recipients. For example, if Amy starts a conversation with Bobby, Chis, and Dana, and Chris and Dana are using SMS, Messenger will make sure Chris gets Dana SMS messages, and vise versa. I thought this was a nice touch, and incredibly important to making group chat work well.

Group chat allows you all of the functionality of one on one chat, including messages, sharing locations, and sending photos. This functionality is MUCH better than most stock SMS apps, since if you send a message to multiple people, you will get individual responses back. I can definitely see Messenger being used most to coordinate and make plans with several people at one time.

The settings for group chat are the same as the settings for one on one, except that you can also add a title to the group, as well as customize the photo. If you don’t select a photo, Messenger will make a grid of everyone photos to display on the list of conversations.

Settings and Other Features

On top of continuing conversations and starting new ones, as long as you are logged in to Messenger, you will get notifications for any new conversations started by your friends. This can be changed in Settings.

General Settings

The settings for Messenger are pretty standard; you can turn all alerts on or off, and choose between being alerted through sound, vibrate, blinking light, or some combination of the three, as well as what sound you would like to hear. You can also turn location sharing on or off, which you can do for each individual message by pressing the blue arrow in the text box for a conversation.

There are also a couple of advanced settings: Clear image cache and Clear conversation cache. I imagine these two functions will free up some memory on your phone, although it may take a bit longer to load a conversation next time you enter a chat you have previously entered.

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