Facebook reveals the upcoming features of Events

Facebook events product manager Aditya Koolwal has shared the features that Facebook events team is currently working on and users can expect in upcoming month. Facebook is updating the events to enhance the way Facebook users interact with each other.

Facebook has reached to over 1.44 billion monthly active users in the latest quarter and it is continuously growing in size and influence. These users create hundreds of thousands of events every day. Events could be the public events or private dinner parties engaging several hundreds to a few people. The Facebook event team is continuously working on providing the best engagement with event features.

Facebook events product manager Aditya Koolwal has given a look upon what features users can expect from his team in upcoming months to Mashable. He told that the team keeps on experimenting with different features and tweaking the existing ones to provide a better experience to users. Following are some features that you can expect in Facebook events.

More events display in news feed

Users can already see the updates about any event they have been invited or their friends have responded. But you can expect more event stories in your news feed now. According to Aditya, if users will see more events they will respond to more events. That is critical for any event success.

Event recommendations in news feed

You will not only see more events in news feed, but you will also get the event recommendations in the news feed from Facebook now. Once you respond to any event Facebook will provide you the drop down list suggesting the related events occurring in upcoming weeks or months.

Event sharing through Messenger

Event host will be able to share the event through messenger. It will be shared as an attachment with other users. Facebook messenger already has over 600 million users. This feature will definitely help users to share an event and that is also without leaving the messenger app.

One-to-one chat in event group

Facebook already allows users to start a group chat for any specific event. But this update will allow event host to initiate one-to-one chat with the person who has responded to request or being invited. This will surely take event experience to the next level.

Event invitation to non-Facebook users

Event host will be able to invite non-Facebook friends as well. Aditya told Mashable – “One thing we’ve heard from feedback, especially from emerging markets, when users are creating events is that they can’t invite all their friends because not all of them Facebook”. Though Facebook has not started experimenting with this, but you can expect it to come in next year allowing invitation via email id.

Invitation receipt for private events

It doesn’t matter if you have created public event, but in case of private events it can be very obliging. Just like messenger app event host will be able to see whether recipient has viewed the invitation or not. Knowing who has shown the invitation and who is coming will definitely help host to keep more accurate head count of attendees.

A separate events App (Not sure)

Facebook has adopted “family of apps” approach in recent years that includes various apps like Messenger, Instagram, Hyperlapse etc. A separate app for events makes sense in such scenario. But Facebook has no such plan as of now. They are currently focusing on broadening the integrated Facebook experience. But it won’t be any surprise if they launch a separate app in upcoming years.

Aditya has not told exactly when users can expect these updates. As Facebook spends only a few weeks in testing the update, we can assume based on the past experience that these updates would be available for users very soon in the upcoming months and most of them in this year only. I personally look for the event-sharing feature through messenger app. Which update is going to be crucial, according to you?