Facebook has launched a new mobile messaging application, Facebook Messenger. The app allows users to send messages to contacts on Facebook and in the mobile's phone book through notifications and texts. It also supports group conversations, you can add your location to message and attach photos to messages. Currently, Facebook Messenger is available for free in America, Canada, England and Ireland. The next weeks it will also be available in other countries, including the Netherlands.

Facebook will compete with the similar and popular Whats App and Blackberry Messenger. The service is not available for the Blackberry yet, but Facebook mentioned this will be the case in the near future. An advantage of Facebook Messenger could be that the messages can be send to your friends on Facebook, without the necessity of having them as a contact in your mobile phone. 

Earlier this year as a response to the possible implementation of net neutrality in Dutch law, the Dutch providers KPN, T-Mobile and Vodafone indicated they suffered from services such as Whats App. Not only are these services available for free, and the Telco’s as a result lose income, the services also generate extra data use on the internet. The Telco’s have to deal with the situation of cooping with maintaining the good quality of the data network and they announced they therefore have to delay or obstruct these services. However, the Dutch Parliament prevented this and decided to implement net neutrality in the Dutch law. 

For the ISP’s the launch of Facebook Messenger is not a good development. This is comprehensible, as the Telco’s are losing revenues due to the popular free SMS services. On the other hand you could say that Facebook is cleverly responding to the popularity of the social network and encouraging the creation of new business models, something the Telco’s could learn from.

Reference: Telecompaper.com