Facebook’s new Messenger App now has more than 500 million users. Also, women, it seems, like Facebook a lot more than men do as the company cut a deal with BuzzFeed.
Launched in 2011, the Messenger App has now more than doubled from just 200 million users back in April. So much for all of those complaints by people who were annoyed at being forced to use two separate Facebook apps on their smart phones.
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500 million is almost half of all Facebook users worldwide and probably most of those who use mobile devices.
“Messaging is an important part of how people stay connected and since Messenger launched in 2011 we’ve been passionate about giving people a faster and more expressive way to communicate, ” said Facebook’s director of product management Peter Martinazzi.
The company, however, has yet to find a way how to make money off of the free app. “We could take the cheap and easy approach and just try to put ads in or do payments and make some money in the short term. But we’re not going to do that, promised Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.
So how will it make money? Who knows?
Now a new Survata.com survey has found that while 57% of men prefer Facebook over Twitter, a whopping 69% of women prefer Facebook. But Twitter did narrowly beat Facebook amongst kids aged 13-17 by a margin of 50.7% to 49.3%.
This could be a troubling sign for Facebook as its dominance over Twitter only increases as people get older. Or it could just be that way because many parents do not let their kids use Facebook.
Facebook had 58% choose it over Twitter amongst people aged 18-24, 70% in ages 25-34 and a whopping 92% amongst people over 55.
In other Facebook news, the world’s largest social network has agreed to provide BuzzFeed with “sentiment analysis” data on millions of its users.
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said, “The vast new network of some 185 million Americans opens the possibility, for instance, of a congressional candidate gaining traction without the expense of television, and of an inexpensive new viral populism. The way people share will shape the outcome of the presidential election… a rawly powerful video may reach far more voters in a few hours than a multimillion-dollar ad buy; and it will reach them from trusted sources — their friends — not via suspect, one-way channels.”
