Facebook Messenger now has message threads

Facebook Messenger aficionados, good news: It just got easier to respond to your best buds’ messages with hot takes.

Facebook today announced that message replies are launching globally for the more than 1.3 billion people who use Messenger.

Long-pressing on the text to which you want to reply and tapping on the Reply icon kicks things off; you’re able to respond to individual GIFs, videos, emoji, text, and photo messages.And thankfully, replies don’t interfere with the text thread: The original message remains visible after it’s been responded to.

The launch of replies follows shortly after Messenger gained an ‘unsend’ feature that gave users the ability to remove a message from a one-on-one or group chat for up to ten minutes after it has been sent, and following an earnings call during which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company was committed to making more of its products ephemeral, in response to growing user demand.

It also follows a year in which Facebook recommitted to “streamlining” and “simplifying” the Messenger experience.

Facebook eventually intends to unify the infrastructure underlying its family of messaging services with end-to-end encryption, according to The New York Times. Reportedly, users will still be able to download each app separately after the migration is complete, but WhatsApp users will be able to send messages to friends who have Facebook or Instagram, for instance, even if those friends don’t have WhatsApp.

Original article