Right now if you wanted to message someone on Facebook Messenger and if you guys aren’t friends, you’ll get a message request. This lets you chat with the other person without necessarily having to add them as friends. However Facebook appears to be testing some kind of new feature for its Messenger app that’s a different take on the current system.
According to BuzzFeed News, the social network is testing out some kind of “Add Contact” feature in Messenger. Basically if you wanted to message someone on Messenger but don’t want to add them on Facebook as a friend, you can instead add them on Messenger where you guys will be connected, just not on Facebook itself. In a way, it’s almost as if Messenger were being spun off as its own social network (it’s not).
Given that Facebook has sort of removed Messenger from its mobile app into its own standalone app, this move makes sense, especially if Facebook is hoping to turn its messaging platform from a mere feature of Facebook into a product that can compete with other messaging apps such as WhatsApp, LINE, Snapchat, WeChat, and so on.
It is unclear as to when exactly will this feature become live for all its Messenger users, but we have in the past seen Facebook test out new features that don’t necessarily make it into the final product, so we guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this one plays out.