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Facebook adding more features to Messenger app

Michael Liedtke Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook is trying to mold its Messenger app into a more versatile communications hub as smartphones create new ways for people to connect with friends and businesses beyond the walls of the company’s ubiquitous social network.

To pull it off, Facebook Inc. is opening Messenger so outside programmers can build features tailored for the service. By the end of April, Messenger will also be adding the ability to display store receipts and shipping information to help consumers keep track of their interactions with merchants and other businesses.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the Messenger expansion Wednesday to about 2,000 app developers at the opening of a two-day conference in San Francisco.

“We have been building Messenger into a service to express beyond text,” Zuckerberg said. He promised even more tools will be rolling out in the months ahead.

Since Messenger’s introduction four years ago, Facebook has added the ability to attach video, share videos, swap stickers, make phone calls and send money.

The push to plant more features in Messenger underscores the growing importance of apps that enable more intimate and direct conversations than social networks.

Younger people, in particular, are increasingly using a wide range of mobile messaging apps to communicate with different circles of friends, while spending less time broadcasting their activities on Facebook’s more expansive social network. The list of apps pulling people away from Facebook includes Snapchat, KakaoTalk, Kik, Line, Secret, Tango, Viber and Whisper.

Thanks largely to its Facebook ties, Messenger already has more than 600 million users, Zuckerberg said. Facebook’s social network is more than twice as large with about 1.4 billion users.

Analysts widely expect Facebook to begin showing ads with Messenger as people spend more time in the app to do different things, though the Menlo Park, California, company hasn’t revealed plans to turn the app into a marketing vehicle.