Facebook offers secret treat to loyal users as it celebrates ‘major milestone’
Social network celebrates in style by giving a nice little prezzie to its vast number of fans
Facebook Messenger is now used by more than one billion people every month, the social network has announced.
To celebrate, it's rolling out a nice little surprise for its loyal users in the form of a secret treat.
All you need to do to enjoy Mark Zuckerberg's prezzie is send a balloon emoji on Messenger to be be treated to a pleasant demonstration of Facebook's happiness.
We caught up with David Marcus, VP of Messenger at Facebook, and asked him what Zuck thought of the fact that almost one in six people now use his messaging app.
"Mark is always focused on the next milestone," he said.
"He's happy, but he recognises these are early days."
Marcus said Messenger was changing the way people are communicating, because it was helping us to move away from a world where the best way to contact someone was by remembering their phone number.
He added: "The beauty of Messenger at a scale of one billion users is that you don't need their phone number to contact them. You just find anyone you want to talk to and reach out to them.
"People aren't associated with a random series of numbers."
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Messenger is the second most popular iOS app of all time, behind Facebook.
More than one billion messages are sent between people and businesses each month, a number that's more than doubled in the past year.
People send more than 17 billion photos to friends using Messenger every month.
On average, more than 22 million GIFs are sent every day via Messenger. That's 254 GIF's per second.
There are more than 250 sticker packs available in Messenger with more than 4,000 stickers.
More than 380 million stickers are sent every day.
Messenger has been downloaded more than 1 billion times on Android.
The high-flying Facebook said Messenger had changed his life in one major way.
"I was always so diligently obsessed with having a contact book that was up to date and I spent quite a bit of time managing it.
"But in the past months I haven't updated contacts because I don't need to.
"I just type their name into Messenger and talk to them."
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