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You must have gone through the awkward feeling of getting a Facebook message from some non-friend who claims to know you, but whom you can’t remember for the life of you just by looking at their tiny photo. Now Facebook’s Messenger app will save you the embarrassment of that person figuring out you’re clueless, because it will give some basic information about him/her, that is bound to jog your memory.
This new feature will prove helpful is a lot of other situations concerning online chatting, as the virtual world is filled with weirdos from the real world. And since some conversations are clearly better left in the “What if…” pile, Facebook will come to your rescue and give you some insight on who you’d be talking to.
The feature mainly concerns people who are contacting you for the first time, and it will tell you some of the most important and representative details about them: the city they are currently living in, their jobs and the common friends that you share with them, of any.
This information is bound to help you, at least to some extent, to decide whether or not you want to start chatting with that person. Furthermore, it will not breaching his/her privacy, as the feature will only show you the details that the user has selected to be public information.
This new feature of Messenger comes as a start to fixing its previous mistakes regarding those messages that made it to the “Other” folder simply because they came from people who were not your Facebook friends.
And if you’ve ever looked for a roommate on a Facebook group, then you will know just how annoying it can be to depend on which folder your message gets to. People have sent important messages, that have ended up in the virtual purgatory that is the “Other” folder, and got buried in spam and questionable promotions.
Furthermore, people have missed messages that might have been essential to them, simply because they never noticed them in the utter mess of the “Other” folder.
This Messenger feature comes to complete the Caller ID app that Facebook issued for Android users, called Hello. What this app does is use the phone number of the person who is calling you to show you their most important Facebook information. Obviously, this can only happen if they have included their phone number in their Facebook profile.
This is a valuable tool to have since it can give you the 411 on unknown callers, so that you are not taken by surprise anymore. Moreover, it will block the call in the case that the person issuing it is someone you have blocked on Facebook or who has been reported for spamming.
With the Hello app and the new and improved Messenger, Facebook can make sure that you are never taken by surprise ever again. So the next time a former college buddy of yours or the person you talked to at that concert contacts you, you will receive enough information to decide if want to start chatting away or if you want to hit the ignore button.
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