Facebook To Develop A Close-Friends-Like Feature For Messenger

Facebook is working on a brand new feature for its Messenger app, which allows you to send content to certain friends who you identified as close. The company calls the feature Favorites for now and its existence was first reported by Jane Manchun Wong, and Facebook later confirmed the information. This function shares the same underlying principle with Instagram’s “Close Friends” launched last year.

The feature will let you designate certain people as part of your inner circle. After that, whenever you have a Story or other updates to would like to share via Messenger, you can send it directly to that list. However, according to Facebook, this is no way to restrict access to your content.

Favorites acts to help reduce the effort of users when they need to share content. It also coincides with Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement to make the site a communication place where users can worry less about their privacy being compromised. So, in short, what the company is trying to do is to pivot Facebook into something like a living room, not a town square where everyone has the right to access.

We have already had a tool to sort friends into categories like Restricted, Acquaintances, and Close Friends. However, this move proves that the company is trying to offer something even simpler by providing a list of close friends you can send content directly to, like what it has done to Instagram.

The Favorites feature is still at its infant stage, so much so that it has not been tested internally yet. So until it is officially released, we may see lots of change in the way it works. Another possibility is that the feature will never be released.