Facebook has recently made a lot of changes to its platform, with the change in image size in mobile news feed being the prominent one. However, the Californi-based company has announced to remove the chat facility from its Groups.
The chat feature for Facebook Groups was introduced last year with the sole purpose of allowing Group members to communicate with each other in real-time. However, the option to start a Messenger chat in a Group was taken away on August 16th and the rest of the shutting down process will be completed by the 22nd, as mentioned above.
After 22nd August, all the current chats in the Groups will be archived and will become read-only. These chats will not be phased out completely though as members would still be able to search for the chat in Messenger and read the conversation history. The options to write a new message and add a participant to the Chat will no longer exist, unfortunately.
A big change to note is that Group Chats in Messenger shall not be affected by this move and users will still be able to start a group chat with whoever they are connected to on Messenger.
The new move has its fair share of pros and cons. Although the facility provided an opportunity to stay connected with fellow members, some users felt annoyed being added to random Group chats. Now only time will tell will this move be fruitful for Facebook or not in the long run.
