Ever since the early days of its conception, Facebook has revolutionized the way we interact with information — one of the most important being the way we categorize it: with "likes," "comments" and "shares." There is one emotion, however — manufactured in large quantities on social media networks like Facebook — that's hard to neatly wrap up: empathy.

"I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a Q&A at Facebook's headquarters. "Today is a special day because today is the day I can say we're working on it and shipping it."

The shift comes after a very palpable limitations to the way people interact with news on Facebook — "what they really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment," says Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg is weary of the Reddit model, where upvotes get a post more attention while downvotes do the opposite. The whole idea of the upcoming "dislike" button is to let users express feelings other than simply "liking."

There is no word on when this feature will go live. All Zuckerberg offers is that "it's surprisingly complicated to make an interaction that will be simple."

facebook messenger just hit more than  1billion downloads in the play store . We always had a notion that facebook wants to keep all there users in using there messenger app.

To keep such large amount of community interested is a tough task but now i think facebook has found a solution for it...GAMES!!

This is not the first time facebook launching  apps for messenger,
Facebook launched its first round of apps for the Messenger back in March of this year, but no games were included with in it.

Most apps were for sharing gifs, still images and videos with friends, which makes the new Doodle Draw for Messenger the first game for Facebook Messenger

There where reports from  May onwards ,  that Facebook was in talks with various developers to create games for the Messenger platform, so assume Doodle Draw will be the first of many games for Messenger. 

The app is more-or-less a copy of Draw Something which, if you remember, was a game which took over the world for about five minutes in 2012, itself a copy of an extremely obscure game called Pictionary. If you don't remember either of those, one person draws something and the other has to guess: a perfect game for the Messenger platform if there ever was one.

Apps and games in Messenger are designed to keep users engaged with the app for a longer time. More engagement with the app would theoretically lead to more user engagement with Facebook's mobile and desktop platforms, which would help increase ad revenue.

TechCrunch Senior Writer Josh Constine is concerned that games could turn Messenger into a home for spam, much in the way that Farmville (and pretty much everything else from Zynga) made a mess of Facebook's desktop platform.

If you remember that dark period, you'll undoubtedly share this fear.

As Constine notes, Doodle Draw doesn't really assuage this fear as players earn in-game currency for getting more friends to play with them. It's not difficult to imagine Messenger being overrun with spammy games if Facebook doesn't do anything to discourage this.

If my guesses are correct its  not far from a time that chat heads popup with ads...
I mean zuckerberg is not doing this for charity is he
 

Facebook crowed that an Android version of its Messenger app has been downloaded more than a billion times from the Google Play store. “Happy to make it to the very exclusive Android 1 billion+ downloads club,” the head of the Messenger team David Marcus said in an online post.
Other than Facebook, only Google boasts apps with more than a billion Google Play downloads onto Android-powered mobile devices, according to technology news website TechCrunch.
A chat forum on Messenger’s page at Google Play was rich with accolades but peppered with comment that the high download count was driven by Facebook spinning the widely used service out of the social network, compelling people to get the app. Facebook last year broke off Messenger from the main Facebook application for mobile users, creating a separate platform that claims more than 600 million users.
Facebook in April began rolling out video calling on its Messenger mobile application, enabling face-to-face conversations among users of the app around the world.
With the new feature, users can add video to calls to another person with the same application. Similar services are offered by Microsoft’s Skype, Google Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime.
Free calling has been available for two years to users of Messenger, although people may be required to pay for data used during the connections.
The world’s biggest social network also opened up Messenger to outside developers as part of its strategy to create a “family” of apps that also includes Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook has offered few hints on how it will monetize Messenger, but recently unveiled a system of peer-to-peer payments which could be adapted as an e-commerce platform.
Messenger also lets users communicate with online merchants, essentially turning formerly impersonal Internet shopping into ongoing text message conversations.

Getting messages from someone you don't know can be a pretty intimidating experience. How did they find you? Why did they reach out?

To make new connections less jarring, Facebook Messenger is introducing a new feature on Thursday that gives you bits of information about someone messaging you for the first time, whether the person is one of your Facebook friends or not. The Messenger team is rolling it out to iOS and Android users in the U.S., UK, France and India over the next few weeks.