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Facebook Messenger gets admin rights for group chats

In this modern world, some days it can feel like everything is out of your grasp. So take stock on those things that you can control. Like Messenger, Facebook’s increasingly feature-rich offshoot app, which now sports admin privileges for group chats.

The new feature is rolling out this week, giving users the ability to better keep group chats on lockdown. Admins can do your standard array of adminy-type things: adding and removing members and promoting and demoting users with admin privileges of their own. It’s enough to make Messenger users downright mad with power.

Also new is the addition of joinable links — send them to a new person you want to join via email and voila, they’re on board. The new additions should help position Messenger as a more fully formed Telegram competitor, as Facebook increasingly views the app as a standalone offering in its own right.

The company’s been rolling out features to the app at pretty steady clip over the past year, including mentions, reactions, group payments and customizable groups. According to the company, 2.5 million new groups were created on the app every day last year. So a little added power goes a long way.

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Facebook’s next money-maker: Messenger Broadcasts

 Users might hate it, but Facebook is now testing a self-serve sponsored messaging tool for small businesses that aren’t sophisticated enough to build bots. TechCrunch first reported back in November Facebook internally building a prototype of the Messenger Broadcast tool that let companies blast a message to anyone who’s already started a conversation with them. Now Facebook is… Read More

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Pulse Q&A wants to transform the way we gather data from CIOs

 Lots of companies need to understand what CIOs are thinking, but it’s hard to get a group of busy people to give meaningful answers about the products they use or their budget priorities in public forums for obvious reasons. Pulse Q&A is a new company in the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class that wants to change how we gather and share this valuable information. “Imagine you had… Read More

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Facebook Messenger’s ‘Your Emoji’ status tells friends what’s up

 Want to let friends know you’re trying to party, hit the gym, focus on work or grab a drink? That’s the idea behind a powerful new feature Facebook Messenger is testing called Your Emoji. Akin to offline meetup app Down to Lunch, it lets you overlay a chosen emoji on your Messenger profile pic for 24 hours as a way to spur conversation and hang outs, or just let people know what… Read More

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Lea’s live event assistant for Messenger makes buying tickets easier

 Buying event tickets online isn’t a great experience. Sites like Ticketmaster are the default, but are difficult to use and expensive. A startup called Lea wants to offer a more modern experience by combining event search, discovery, seat selection and payment all in a single application that works right in Facebook Messenger. Read More

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Pinterest integrates deeper with Facebook with a new bot and messenger extension

 As Pinterest looks to further expand beyond just the audience you’d expect to use it, it’s going to have to start chasing down users and meet them on different territories — and that includes messaging apps. So today Pinterest is launching a pair of updates that is going to help it tap into that audience of people that are sharing content on Facebook Messenger. Read More

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Facebook ‘Messenger Kids’ lets under-13s chat with whom parents approve

 Facebook is opening up to children under age 13 with a privacy-focused app designed to neutralize child predator threats that plague youth-focused competitors like Snapchat. Rolling out today on iOS in the U.S., “Messenger Kids” lets parents download the app on their child’s phone or tablet, create a profile for them and approve friends and family with whom they can text… Read More

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Facebook prototypes Messenger Broadcast for businesses

 Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion-user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast,” a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More

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Facebook Stories replaces Messenger Day with synced cross-posting

 Facebook is cleaning up the redundancy in its Snapchat Stories clones. Today Facebook is killing off the Messenger Day brand and merging the chat app’s stories feature with Facebook Stories. Now, just called “Stories,” 24-hour ephemeral posts in either Facebook or Messenger will appear in both apps, and viewing will be synced, too. Read More

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