Facebook wants to build mobile payments and "secret conversations" into Messenger

Facebook is said to be working on deploying even more features into its Messenger apps - as if the money-sending and virtual assistant, for example, weren't enough.

The big one is that apparently Facebook will use Messenger as its mobile payments play, rivaling Apple Pay and Android Pay and letting you to pay for things in physical stores. This would expand upon the aforementioned existing feature that lets you send money to friends.

The revelations come from a look at comments in the code of the Facebook Messenger app for iOS. Another new thing coming in the future is "secret conversations", though it's unclear exactly what that means. It could be a way to hide certain conversations from Messenger's list, or maybe a feature that lets you set an auto-expiration for some dialogues. Then again, it could be as simple as encrypting messages.

You should also expect to see some kind of calendar syncing built into Messenger, as well as easy sharing of quotes from articles and sending status updates to only a subset of your friends.

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