Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has decided to take matters into his own hands after the growth slows down for Facebook following some scandals. Zuckerberg plans to integrate Facebook’s messaging services which are WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
Zuckerberg is looking to merging the three major social messaging apps – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, a report in the New York Times revealed. This comes after the hectic two years the company has seen with mounting privacy issues, fake news and other political scandals.
The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, reported by the New York Times.
By merging these apps together, Zuckerberg hopes to keep users within the company’s ecosystem and “reduce” the number of people moving to services offered by Apple and Google. And it will also allow users to communicate across the platforms of Facebook messaging services.
The plan, although, in its earlier stages is set up to be completed by the end of 2019 or early 2020.
Until now, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have been run as separate and competing products. Integrating the messaging parts might simplify Facebook’s work. Cross-platform messaging may also lead the way for businesses on one platform to message potential customers on another.
Facebook can compete more effectively with Google’s messaging services and Apple’s iMessage by joining all of their users into one massive group.
Facebook said in a statement, “We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.”
“We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks,” it added.
Instagram’s founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the company in 2018 as they were reportedly miffed by Zuckerberg’s “increased grip” on Instagram. WhatsApp cofounders Jan Koum and Brian Acton left as well for similar reasons, said The Sun in a report.
It remains to be seen how Facebook’s integration of its messaging services will manage to compete with other messaging services without compromising the user’s privacy and security.
