Having so many friends can be a bit of a nuisance for some reasons. When you have hundreds of Facebook friends, you only interact with a handful and tend to forget who the others are especially if they share similar names, is it John from work or John from high school and it could be an another completely different John. What if you don’t want to talk to one of the many Johns you have on your Facebook friends list? Let’s face it, we all have some weirdos whom we like keeping them on our friends list, but with whom we don’t want to communicate, or weirdos who just won’t stop messaging, right? There are also these awkward moments when you get messages from people you don’t know. Well, you can rest assured because Facebook has got you covered and rolled out a new service on messenger called Caller ID to give you some peace of mind. So let’s see what this Facebook Caller ID has to offer.
Facebook Caller ID, Yay or Nay?
Facebook Caller ID is developed specifically to give you basic shared information on who contacts you on Facebook messenger when they start a conversation, such as: occupation, location, school, etc, so that you will know who is calling you before you pick up. This feature comes in an attempt to reduce the number of bad experiences Facebook users have sometimes with other members like: bullies or stalkers who might threaten them, or simply people with whom they had unpleasant experiences with. Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging, David Marcus posted saying:
“Today we’ve started rolling out what I like to call “caller ID for messaging”. Now you’ll have context about the people contacting you on Messenger with a bigger photo and more details about how you’re related, and much more. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do, and as always, send feedback our way!”
In addition to having the caller’s information shown to you, you can also see their profile picture which might help jog your memory about that particular contact.
The catch…
Facebook Caller ID will only make you only able to see the contact’s information that is set to public view or set for you to see. It isn’t likely for you to get the caller’s information that he/she don’t want to share with you or publicly on Facebook.
Perfect Timing
Facebook Caller ID comes just weeks after Facebook has launched its video calling service that works over LTE and Wi-Fi and is even available on both Android and iOS. These two services allow you to make audio and video calls as well as knowing who’s the caller instead of blindly answering a contact that you don’t want to communicate with. Facebook said:
“You can quickly start a video call from any conversation with just one tap.” …”If you’re messaging with someone and realise that words just aren’t enough, you can simply choose the video icon in the top right corner of the screen and start a video call right from within an existing Messenger conversation.”
Facebook Caller ID will be available on Android only in the U.S., U.K., France and India in the next few weeks. We don’t know when it’s going to spread to other countries, yet.
