If you’ve integrated your Facebook settings into your Windows Phone, you’ll no doubt love the convenience of having your Facebook Chat conversations baked into the OS. It’s wonderfully handy being able to see your conversation history neatly threaded with SMS messaging, and helpfully associated with your contacts via the People Hub.
But until now, when a contact has been offline, Windows Phone has refused to let you send an offline Facebook message, requiring that you switch to sending an SMS text message to the contact instead. To send a Facebook message to an offline contact, you will have had to open up the standalone Facebook app and complete the process through there.
Users have voiced their frustration at this limitation for some time – but their calls have not fallen upon deaf ears. WMPoweruser spotted a report from Spanish Windows Phone community site, MiMovilWindows, who noticed that Microsoft has made some behind-the-scenes changes to enable offline Facebook messaging via Windows Phone’s built-in messaging centre.
On the face of it, nothing has changed: if you’re about to send a Facebook message to an offline contact, Windows Phone will still tell you that the contact is offline, and prompt you to consider sending a text message instead. But if you ignore that suggestion and send a message anyway, the message will still be delivered to the contact’s Facebook account the next time they’re online.
Check out this video (in Spanish) of the updated feature in action:
Be sure to let us know if your messages are – or aren’t – getting through to your offline contacts, in the comments below.