Facebook arguably owns the biggest social media platforms today with each having over a billion users separate from the mother ship. We have seen them try to integrate them together little by little and that will not end, as reported by the New York Times.
According to the publication, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and founder is planning to integrate the social network’s messaging services (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram).
According to sources, apparently thousands of Facebook employees are to reconfigure how these services function at their most basic levels. The plan is to unify the messaging infrastructure but still the three services will continue operating as standalone apps.
All the apps will apparently incorporate end to end encryption which is good for security and if completed, a Facebook user can send an encrypted message to someone with a WhatsApp account.
This work is apparently in its early stages and they hope to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020.
This is a surprising change of tact by Zuckerberg in how he treats his companies. Facebook Messenger was a home grown app that was spurn off Facebook, but Instagram and WhatsApp were subsidiaries that functioned as separate entities.
The move to integrate their messaging services is a move to make them more useful to people. However, this move will raise questions about data privacy due to sharing of information between the three services. There is also the problem of matching identities between WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram and it will make it difficult for people who like separating their identities between platforms.
