When iOS 5 ships this fall with iMessage support, it could revolutionize the way we look at text messaging, from the de facto way of quickly pinging a person on our phones to an expensive way we reach out to our friends who inexplicably don’t have iPhones.
But could iMessage have a big competitor in Facebook? It’s increasingly looking like it, as inside sources inside Facebook are now claiming that the social networking giant are working on integrating free text messaging to any number into Facebook chat.
According to a report from iPhone Italia, Facebook will expand its messaging platform by allowing users to text from directly within Facebook chat.
The killer feature here seems to be that it will work not only to Facebook friends, but even to people who aren’t signed up for Facebook.
The only real problem here seems to be that these messages will be sent from Facebook’s number, not your own number, but apparently, return texts will pop up just fine within Facebook’s messaging system.
This seems pretty killer to me… the kind of thing that might give iMessage a run for its money. Facebook’s already separated Messaging into its own dedicated iOS app… if it can send texts to non-Facebook members on top of what it already does, I’m not sure what there is to recommend iMessage anymore.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “Facebook Is Looking To Take On iMessage And BlackBerry Messaging With Free Universal Texting [Report]”
No thanks. Just another thing for FB to gather and hold all your personal info. I personally would never use this feature. I have unlimited text messaging on my iPhone, which includes pic, vid, and audio. And use Live Profile to chat with some BB friends who don’t have text plan. They work just fine for me. Unless its something state of the art, that no one else has, extremely simple to use, and will completely blow iMessage out of the water, I don’t feel the need to “fix what isn’t broken”.
This could “almost” work except for the fact that it will essentially only allow people to reply back to a message you send them. If theres not a personal number for each user there will be no way to create a message on your phone and send to your facebook friend, only reply back to a message they send to you.Â
I’ve been using this app for about a month, when it was released. I like it. It works extremely well and works with non Facebook using contacts.
Agreed. FB already collects plenty of data on each user no matter what the privacy setting in-place are. Definitely a “no thanks” +1