Gadgetory

Facebook Messenger has a few new surprises this holiday I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNET update Facebook is just cramming its messenger app with new features for the holidays if you're sharing photos of friends and family over the chat app you're going to notice that it can recognize faces and suggest that you send it to them the facial recognition tool that's in the main Facebook app for tagging photos is now rolling out to the messenger app but in messenger it's there to remind you to send the photo to that person now face book calls it photo magic but if you call it weird well you can tell Facebook to not suggest your face to others in settings or you can turn off suggestions completely inside messenger the app is also letting you set a color for a conversation if you rather not have everything be blue and white you can also set nicknames so your mom can show up as mom instead of her full name on Facebook and you know that big thumbs up you can send well you can change that to another emoji to change these things on iOS tap the name of the person in the chat and it will open up a list of choices on Android there is an info button on the top right that makes these changes and the other person is going to see all the changes you make also there are some winter surprises if you send anything winter or snow or Christmas related in a message you're going to see snowflakes fall on your screen and for Android users that still use chat heads you're going to see snow falling in profile bubbles or during the new year it's going to show confetti now not everything new is a silly effect Facebook also made a deal with uber so you can request a ride pickup inside of the messenger app instead of having to open a separate uber app type out and address and click on it to request a ride or you can tap the car icon now when you connect your account to Facebook the first write is free when you use messenger well it's just a twenty dollar value which could be helpful for those holiday parties to get it to show up you're going to tap the ellipses more icon and go to transportation Facebook implies that we may see other ride services on their tube and TechCrunch is reporting from a source that competitor lyft could be on messenger in January Facebook Messenger is the fastest-growing app of 2015 and that according to a new report from Nielsen the main Facebook app is still the top smartphone app of all with more than 126 million average unique users a month but Facebook Messenger has the greatest increase of users from last year and that's because Facebook forces you to download it if you want to check privately on mobile that's it for this tech news update and there's always more at sea Netcom from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey