• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 17, 2018

Just in time for the holidays, Facebook Messenger is adding several new features, including to the Boomerang and Selfie modes.

Boomerang -- which spices up video snippets with a looping effect -- has been available as a standalone feature for years.

The Selfie mode makes it easier for users to capture portraits and self-portraits by focusing on their faces rather than whatever surrounds them.

Cheramie Cheung, a product manager at Facebook’s Messenger unit, said the new additions were scheduled for a holiday release.

“The holiday season is one of the most popular times of year for people to use Messenger,” Cheung notes in a new blog post. “In fact, Christmas and New Year's are the biggest days of the year for overall messages sent on Messenger.”

Throughout the year, an average of roughly 20 million people use camera effects for photo and video posts on Messenger, every day.

Cheung and his team are also making trying to make it easier to navigate Messenger’s existing camera modes, which include Normal, Video and Text.

In Text mode, for example users will now be able to add more “personality” with new fonts and color backgrounds.

With help of some proprietary AI, Messenger is also trying to make it easier for users to discover new stickers.

At present, Facebook said users send more than 440 million stickers via Messenger chats, every day. It is trying to grow that figure.

More broadly, Facebook’s eponymous app -- including Messenger -- saw usage decline by 6% in aggregate, from October 2017 to October 2018. Worse, time spent fell by 10%, year-over-year, according to recent analysis of Nielsen data by Pivotal Research.