Even with the outage that users experienced this week, Zoom seems to be the video conferencing app of choice for a lot of people right now. But Facebook is not down and out, at least on the personal side of things. They’re still pushing for their Messenger Rooms video calling service and adding new features to entice people to use it for their family and friend video calling needs. The latest update now makes it easier to join, create, and manage Rooms from the Messenger mobile app and also brings the ability to customize your background.
One thing that people liked about Zoom and that everyone is now trying to adapt is changing and personalizing your background. Rooms already has immersive 360-backgrounds and mood lighting filters but now they’re letting you add your own photos as background and even customize it with a “funny home video”. Not really sure that a video of you dancing in the background will be conducive to a video call but sure.
Facebook is also making it easier to create and discover Rooms to join in your Messenger app. You’ll see at the top of your Chats tab all the Rooms that you’ve been invited to. You can easily create a Room as the button to do so is right there in your Chats tab. You can also now set a future start date for your video calls, set a default, suggested, or customized activity, and also customize your audience selection.
For managing the rooms, you can easily view, join, or edit the rooms that you’ve created and invite more people to an already scheduled video call. And if you don’t want to be active anymore in a room, you can just delete it. You can also share rooms and send notifications to friends you’ve invited so they won’t forget your scheduled call. Basically, you can do a lot of things on Room to make your video calls more interesting and also easier to manage.
All of these new features are rolling out to the Messenger app. Check first if you’re running the latest version then start to create and join Rooms to your heart’s content.
