Surprised it has not been mentioned yet, but mbasic.facebook.com would solve the issue in both articles. I don't even have a facebook account and I'm constantly referring people to the slimmer version. I guess they must not advertise it.

Before Apple put the address book contacts behind permissions, facebook downloaded the entire thing, without asking, to their servers.

I know this, because I make a very clear distinction between work and non-work data, facebook is non-work, so I will never have colleagues or work related contacts on facebook.

Suddenly one day, out of the blue, I get a facebook "friend suggestion" for a boss I had many years back. There's absolutely _no way_ there are any contact paths from my facebook friends to this person.

The only thing I had done was (reluctantly) installing the facebook mobile app. I researched it and found other people had experienced the same thing. The app simply took your entire address book and started matching up "friends" using that.

WhatsApp seems to do the same today.

Facebook is an evil company that absolutely will take any data they can get their hands on.

a) Users in developing countries want, even need, messaging apps without the bandwidth costs of a full social networking app. This isn't a Facebook "stunt", but rather the reality of trying to acquire users in countries without 3g/4g/wifi bandwidth at affordable costs for consumers. "Facebook Social Network" cannot compete with "WhatsApp" or similar in poor countries, but "Facebook Messenger" can. It's really not a hard concept to understand, unless one is so unaware of how lucky one is to live in a first world country with a steady income.

b) It's funny how the HN crowd spins the separation of the messaging component from the rest of the product as a bad thing. When it comes to Unix, we repeatedly hear about how having separate smaller utilities to accomplish different tasks is the only right way to do things. But a company who splits their essential messaging component from the extremely heavy, unnecessary, optional, nice-to-have addons like a "wall" is somehow evil.

A "messaging app" is a very tiny fraction of the functionality found in a "social networking app". It's extremely sensible to separate them. How anyone can even pretend to attribute this to some nefarious motive is beyond me. And hell, I'm an anti-Facebook nut.

Just using facebook or just using messenger without the other is a pain. Also first time I used FB Messenger on a new phone (an iPhone after using android). Went through several screens of "Add your phone number", "Constantly upload all your contacts!" and "Invite your friends to messenger". all with well hidden ui for skipping each step (particularly the last one).

If I wanted to contact people on messenger they would already have messenger.

When I got aqainted with the APP, I knew right where they are going with it: facebook wants messenger to be their mobile application distribution system. Just look at how heavy the app is. It is way over engineered to simply be a messenger application. Facebook used to rake in money from facebook games. Who plays games on FB anymore? Web games were the largest games market in the world in the early FB era. I developed for some companies that had games and apps on FB. I was in the online freelance community at the time and a ton of money was poured into that. Now everything has gone mobile and they lost one of their gold mines.

From my limited, anecdotal observations this past year (in the U.S.): (Facebook) Messenger is how people PM other people they've met when they haven't swapped phone numbers.

I was at dinner with a friend. Because of unexpected circumstances, we ended up sharing a table with one of her friends and some people that friend was with.

One of her friend's friends was quite gregarious and engaging towards my (non-romantic, by the way) friend. Seemed pretty obvious to me, at least.

We get back to my friend's place, and this guy is IM-ing her on FB Messenger with a bunch of flattering and engaging texts. She didn't give him her number, despite his hints in the restaurant parking lot, but he readily found her on FB through their mutual friend/contact. (Who, by the way, told her, "Yeah, no... He was a jerk to me and you don't want to go there.")

Sorry for the lengthy story. This friend of mine also went through an extended period of significant but not always close network building, this past year. And this is how much of that worked: Where phone numbers weren't shared, PM-ing through FB Messenger.

Messenger is well on the way to becoming the de facto "public" venue for IM-ing.

Other platforms tend to be turned to for more private, personal stuff -- at least among folks who actively use multiple platforms.

P.S. Invasive as it is, and with all the reservations I have, you nonetheless have to give FB credit (as a self-interested business) for turning Messenger into this. And, privacy concerns and limitations aside, it pretty much "just works". Which is the definition of win and first choice, for most "ordinary" folks.

Or maybe this excessively paranoid person could just install Messenger and realize that no one cares enough about him to turn on the two cameras and four microphones and GPS or whatever to spy on him all day.

Because messaging is the new web.

i got 5% battery back after uninstalling FB and messenger