What you need to know
- Messenger has launched a pair of new shortcuts in its app.
- @everyone will notify everyone in your group chat.
- /silent will send your message but not notify anyone in the chat.
Messenger has announced two new features as well as previewed a few others for its iOS app.
In a press release, the company announced that it is launching two new shortcuts to its messaging app. The first is @everyone, a Slack-like feature that will notify everyone in a group chat when you send your message. The other, /silent, will send a message but notify no one when it is sent.
Enter the @everyone and /silent shortcuts, available today to people using Messenger on iOS and Android. When you start a message with @everyone, all participants in the chat will be notified. @everyone is perfect for group reminders, impromptu get-togethers or when you need to gather the braintrust to crowdsource an answer to a time-sensitive question. This way, your message gets maximum exposure, and nobody misses out.Conversely, have you ever been woken up at 4 a.m. by a message from friends who "forgot" you're in a different time zone 😴? When you use /silent (also available on Instagram as "@silent"), the members of your chat will not receive a notification of your message at all. Sending a message with /silent removes the anxiety of interrupting someone with a non-urgent pop-up notification or disturbing them during their off hours. Now, you can share those late-night epiphanies in the moment without disturbing the peace, and your friends can read your message at their leisure.
The company has also previewed some additional shortcut functionality it plans to bring to its app, including a shortcut to pay a friend and one to send a GIF.
/Pay (coming soon to iOS and Android for Messenger fans in the US): Our new /pay shortcut makes it even easier to send and receive money right in your one-on-one Messenger chats. Simply type /pay to send or request money securely without fees – perfect for quickly paying a friend for dinner or getting paid back for a ride./gif (coming soon on iOS): GIFs help us express ourselves, conveying a sense of identity through pop culture references, which in turn help form our larger digital culture. To easily find and send that perfect GIF, use the /gif shortcut – simply type /gif and your chosen topic to see your gif options appear./shrug & /tableflip (coming soon to iOS): Sometimes even a gif can't compare to the emotions conveyed by the old-school text-based tableflip "(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻" and shrug "¯_(ツ)_/¯" emoticons. Instead of struggling to type each emoticon (or having to find it online to copy and paste), simply type in /shrug or /tableflip to add your chosen emoticons to your message.
The @everyone and /silent shortcuts are available today. The rest, according to Meta, will be added "in the coming weeks." The company says that it plans to introduce more shortcuts throughout the year.
You can read everything in the press release.
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