All of us who use Facebook Messenger have probably experienced this once or more than once. A message from an unknown person suddenly pops up and he/she seems to know you or have met you recently, but for the life of you, you have no idea who they are and so you don’t know whether to talk to them or not. Sometimes you ignore them and miss an opportunity or sometimes you do talk to them and waste precious minutes of your life.
But now Facebook is introducing a new feature, nicknamed Chat ID by the folks over at Tech Crunch, which will help you deal with that situation. When someone messages you for the first time and you’re not friends with them, Facebook will now show their basic public information, like “photographer from Nashville” or “teacher from Manila”, which should hopefully jog your memory as to where you met him or her. It will also give that information for your already existing FB friends who will message you for the first time. Admit it, you sometimes forget who that person is, even if you’re already “friends”.
Just a few weeks ago, Facebook introduced the Hello caller ID app (Android only) which helps you identify unknown numbers if they’re on your Facebook or if they’re just spammers or something. It signals another direction that the social network giant is getting into, which is connecting you to online and offline people and giving them “context” so you’ll know how to deal with them.
Don’t worry, the info that will be shown in the Chat ID is only the ones that the user has made public or visible to you, so there are no privacy violations here. You will only be able to see this feature though if you live in France, India, the UK, and the US. Hopefully, they’ll be rolling it out to other countries soon.
VIA: Tech Crunch
