Chat-happy Facebookers rejoice!
Speaking with random strangers just became a whole lot easier with a new service called "Message Requests."
No more will your idle Messenger musings be sent to the endless purgatory known as the "Other Inbox" - a place so obscure it didn't even appear in iOS or Android renditions of the popular social network - when sent to non-friends or non-friends-of-friends.
Instead, says Messenger chief David Marcus, such important missives will now be given the level of prominence they deserve, appearing as a message request along with an appropriate notification.
Taking to his own Facebook account, Marcus
wrote "Now, the only thing you need to talk to virtually anyone in the world, is their name," before defining the one and only rule for the new Message Requests feature:
The rule is pretty simple: If you're friends on Facebook, if you have each other's contact info in your phone and have these synced, or if you have an existing open thread, the new messages from that sender will be routed to your inbox.
Everything else will now be a message request, minus spam attempts that we will continue to ruthlessly combat.
