Facebook Brings Group Voice Calls To Messenger Desktop Client For Select Users

With so many online communication tools allowing you to conduct group calls, it's really quite surprising that Facebook has yet to catch up - at least on the desktop side. This past spring, the company updated its Messenger mobile app to support group calling, but for when actual work is getting done, chances are good people are in front of their computer rather than on-the-go.

Well, this grand omission is soon to be rectified, as Facebook has begun testing the group calling waters with its desktop Messenger app. Group chats are nothing new on Facebook, but they do have limited use when you can't talk to the users in the group, so as to expedite the conversation.

As of the time of writing, the group calling feature isn't being made available to everyone, but it does seem like the roll out is quite wide. If you've ever had a group chat conversation, you can simply go back to it and see if you have an icon up at the top to allow you to start a group call. An example can be seen below:

Don't fret: if you don't use the in-line chat box, you can still use group calling through the dedicated Facebook Messenger website (which is actually worth using if you've never touched it before and use Facebook chat often).

This isn't the only worthy news from Facebook today. We wrote just earlier about 'Social VR', a way to hang out and talk with friends inside of a VR environment. And let's face it: if you're miles and miles apart from a friend, VR is a really useful way to "hang out". Who knew Facebook was so good at social stuff?