Facebook is Adding Quoted Replies to ...

Facebook is rolling out a quoted reply feature for particular messages within Messenger chat streams, which can help you clarify your conversation and make it clear who’s talking to whom with each reply.

The feature comes as an extension of the company’s current reaction emoji. Now, when you press and hold on a message, in addition to adding a reaction emoji, you can respond the message with a new “reply” button, which will attach a quoted version of the replied message to your response. The quoted messages aren’t entirely their own message threads — they’ll still show up in line with the rest of the chat, though it looks useful enough.

It’s similar to a simple feature that WhatsApp has already contributed for a while, so it makes sense that Facebook _who owns WhatsApp_ would bring it to Messenger too. The move is also related to the company’s ambition to design a cross-platform system to combine Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs— reaching similar features on all three platforms would make that eventual merging easier.

Facebook also recently added the option to share Messenger Stories within chat streams, with Stories being the other important area Facebook’s trying to maintain moving forward. The new Messenger chat reply feature is available in the latest version of Messenger.

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