(image: techradar.com)

Facebook continues to innovate in the mobile space. Last year, before the social network went for their IPO they heard a lot of concern from investors that their mobile presence wasn’t up to par with the rest of the company. Since then they’ve continued to improve their mobile apps across all platforms by adding more user friendly features and taking away less user friendly features. As more and more Facbeook users turn to mobile as their main source for visiting and using their Facebook accounts, the company is entrenched in a mobile to mobile initiative.

The latest mobile step for Facebook is an amped up version of their Facbeook Messenger app. The company made this announcement on the official Facebook blog on Tuesday.

While Facebook Messenger started out as a desktop companion to a user’s Facebook account it’s become more and more popular on mobile. Users want the Facebook Messenger experience on mobile but in a lighter weight product, that’s what Facebook is delivering.

The biggest improvements to the new Facebook Messenger are

– The ability to use Facebook Messenger to text people that don’t have Facebook
– A new color scheme which helps users differentiate from which Facebook app they are on
– New lightning bolt icons that allow you to see who’s using Facebook Messenger on mobile, those messages will breeze back and forth even faster

Facebook rolled out the new version of the app to a limited amount of Android users but plan an aggressive beta test and hope to roll out the new feature packed version shortly to all iOS and Android users.