Facebook's Message Requests will replace Other Inbox for receiving messages from users outside your network of friends
Facebook Messenger Wants To BE Your Phone Number With New Message Requests — Phone numbers are dumb. Once someone has yours, you can't stop them from contacting you.
Context & Ripple Effects
Message Requests is the next step in Facebook's campaign to route every conversation through the Messenger app rather than scattered surfaces on facebook.com. It follows the earlier move disabling messaging in the mobile web app to push people toward the standalone client, and precedes the decision to replace the main inbox entirely with Messenger's web interface.
Strategically, it also serves the identity ambition David Marcus laid out when Messenger hit 800M MAUs — the plan to eliminate the need for a phone number by making Messenger itself the way anyone reaches you. Message Requests is the gating mechanism that makes stranger-to-stranger contact safe enough to advertise that.
First-order effects
- Messages from people outside your friend network stop landing silently in a hidden Other folder and now surface as explicit accept/decline requests inside Messenger — changing what a stranger or business has to do to reach you.
Second-order effects
- Every request notification funnels activity into the standalone Messenger app, accelerating the migration away from facebook.com messaging and building the engagement base Marcus needs for his phone-number-replacement roadmap.
Third-order effects
- If Messenger becomes the default reachability layer, Facebook controls not just who can contact whom but the metadata around those attempts — a concentration of contact-graph power that resurfaces years later when the same company is criticized for using phone numbers gathered for 2FA in user lookup and ad targeting.
The trend: Facebook is consolidating every messaging surface and identity signal into Messenger, converting a social-network inbox feature into a universal contact layer.