First, let's look at Facebook's main website. It has a huge amount of functionality. Photos, groups, news, statuses, and so on.
But what if you want to just message a friend? That's relegated to about a quarter of the screen. The rest is just irrelevant annoyances.
Luckily for you, Facebook has a little-known alternative...
Fire up your web browser, and load Messenger.com.
You're greeted with an incredibly clean interface. You get to chat with your friends — and nothing else.
And at the same time, it has a lot of useful features.
In plain white, it doesn't even look like Facebook — which could be a godsend in offices where the social network is banned.
All in all, it's very similar to the mobile Facebook Messenger app — but on desktop web browsers.
Facebook launched Messenger.com back in April 2015. But almost no-one seems to know it exists.
I conducted an (admittedly unscientific) poll of my coworkers. None of them — including other tech journalists — knew it's a thing.
The site only gets about 70 million visits per month, according to Similar Web — a tiny fraction of the overall Facebook audience.
Head on over to Messenger.com now to give it a try, and enjoy messaging your Facebook friends without any of the social network's clutter.
