Facebook Wants to Integrate its Messaging Services on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerburg, has announced plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, into one mega platform.

While all three platforms will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, their underlying messaging infrastructure will be unified. This would allow people using one of the platforms to message and communicate with people on other platforms within the company’s ecosystem. 

So for example, a Facebook user would be able to send a message to someone who only has an Instagram or WhatsApp account. 

And to quell users concern on privacy, Facebook has promised that all platforms will feature end-to-end encryption, so any message you send to whichever platform will be secure.

“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,” Facebook said in a statement.

According to New York Times, this plan is still in the early stages of the work and could be completed by the end of this year or in early 2020.

By merging the apps’ messaging infrastructure, Facebook would be able to to increase the utility of its network since users would now turn to Facebook properties for all their texting/chatting/video call needs. Hence, increasing user engagement amongst it billions of users on the various platforms.

And should this happen, Facebook might just be having an edge over its other competing messaging services, such as Apple’s iMessage and Google’ chat services.

This move is expected to be of huge benefit to Facebook in turn. Increased user engagement will increase the company’s profits as there could be new forms of advertising or other services for which Facebook could charge a fee.