According to The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg has plans to integrate the messaging services across all of the social media platforms he owns – that’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – which will enable their 2.6 billion users to communicate across the three platforms.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean those apps are disappearing and becoming part of some FaceAppGram hybrid – they’ll still exist as standalone apps. What’s changing is the underlying infrastructure, which will be unified, enabling people to communicate across all three apps.
In addition, Zuckerberg has ordered that all of the apps incorporate end-to-end encryption, making conversations secure and only viewable by those actually involved. WhatsApp already has this feature, but Messenger and Instagram do not, although Messenger does give you the option of turning encryption on. Other secure apps include Signal, Telegram, Viber and Wickr.
In a statement, Facebook said it wanted 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.”
As The New York Times explains, this move is designed to keep users “highly engaged inside the company’s ecosystem”.
Frankly, I just miss MSN, and none of what Facebook, Apple, or Google are offering me comes close to the joy of being able to nudge people or sign in and out twenty times in a row to get someone’s attention.
