Facebook is about to make it a lot easier for you to message with people you aren’t friends with yet, so sliding in the DMs might be a thing of the Twitter past and the Facebook future.
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My Other inbox was nearly entirely spam (another reason why the feature stunk), but I also once had someone message me after I lost my wallet. Instead, new messages from unfamiliar connections will be routed to a “Message Request” area. Replacing the Other Folder of the Facebook inbox where messages sent by strangers were kept (and usually remained undiscovered), the new Message Requests feature works in a similar fashion, and allows users to accept or ignore new requests without the sender knowing that they read the message.
Now, someone will only be able to message you if you’re Facebook friends, you have an existing thread, or if you’ve both synced your smartphones contact lists to FB and you each have each other’s numbers. TechCrunch notes that, messages from friends-of-friends will now be treated simply as a request. With Message Requests, the sender won’t know if you saw the message, giving you more room to comfortably ignore messages you don’t want to answer. Otherwise, you’d have to first add someone as a friend before messages would show up on your inbox or on mobile devices.
With Message Requests, which is rolling out over the next several days, Facebook is streamlining how these types of messages are handled. Messages that previously would have been sent to “Other” will now appear within Messenger as a message request.
When you take into account that you don’t need a Facebook account to use Messenger, it’s nearly like names are the new phone numbers.
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The rule is pretty simple, all someone needs is your name in order to contact you, where you have control over whether they can contact you.
