Facebook has made talking to those not on your friend list a lot more easier, here’s how

Have you also at some point felt why Facebook expects its users to go all the way to the ‘Other’ inbox to read texts from people they do not know? It seems the social networking giant has realized that the feature is dysfunctional and has devised a new way to make it a lot more easier for users to read messages from strangers and respond to them if they want. Till now, one didn’t even read these texts coming from those not on their friend list or from friends-of-friend as they were relegated to the ‘other’ inbox which often remained undiscovered by virtue of its placement on the website. Some hardly visited it, a few didn’t even know it existed. Moreover, the worst part was the option wasn’t accessible from Messenger’s iOS or Android apps.

Realizing that one might be missing out on important messages coming from non-friends, Facebook has thought of replacing the old feature with a new one called ‘Message requests’.

Facebook's Vice President of Messaging Products, David Marcus, said in post, "Forget phone numbers! Today, we're excited to start rolling out Message Requests for Messenger. Now, the only thing you need to talk to virtually anyone in the world is their name."

What he meant to say is that anyone in the entire world can now send you a direct message if they know your name and you will receive it in the form of a message request which you can accept or ignore without the sender knowing that you read the message. In a sense, message requests are like friend requests for chat.

This is how the feature will work: When a non-friend sends a message, a request will appear at the top of Messenger on mobile or Inbox on the web. On opening the request, you’ll see the sender’s name, a little public info about them like their city, job, or mutual friends, and the message. You can choose ignore to hide the conversation, or choose reply to move the conversation to your inbox and chat with the person. The other way Marcus puts it is: The new messages from a sender will only be routed to your inbox when it’s from someone you're already friends with 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. “Everything else will now come as a message request, minus spam attempts that we will continue to ruthlessly combat," he said.

Simply put, this feature makes certain things extremely simple - all one needs in order to contact you is your name (no phone number required), but you have control over whether they can contact you again; you can have non-friends who can message you directly. That means you can connect, for example, with people you just met, someone you don’t know but maybe need to talk to, and even businesses. Moreover, it can come handy in urgent situations like someone trying to connect with you to return your lost wallet. Above all, when a message comes, you will be prompted in the same way as you are when you receive messages from your friends (except that it will be in the form of a request for you to accept or deny), so there’s no need to go to ‘other’ inbox option especially to check them – a major reason the older feature remained largely unused.

Notably, the social platform has been aggressively pushing its Messenger and in July enabled users without an account to sign up for its Messenger app with just a phone number.

(Image credit: Economic Times)