Facebook is planning to ‘integrate’ WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, according to a new report by New York Times. The three services will still work as standalone apps, but will be merged so that chats and messages can pass between them.
Mark Zuckerberg regards the integration as a personal project and it will take place next year. All messages sent between the three apps will be encrypted so that only the sender and recipient can see them.
In a statement, Facebook said:
‘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 you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work.’
The integration could spell big changes for users and might not go down with many. Currently, WhatsApp only requires a phone number to set up an account, whereas Facebook requires people to use their real identity. It’s not yet known whether WhatsApp will soon require users to hand over more personal info – but it seems almost certain that the integration will irk the original founders of the messaging app.
Knitting together Facebook’s apps is a stark reversal of Mr. Zuckerberg’s previous stance toward WhatsApp and Instagram, which were independent companies that he acquired. At the time that Facebook bought the firms, Mr. Zuckerberg promised WhatsApp and Instagram plenty of autonomy from its parent company. (Facebook Messenger was a homegrown messaging service, spun out of the main Facebook app in 2014.)
WhatsApp and Instagram have since grown tremendously, prompting a change in Mr. Zuckerberg’s thinking, said one of the people. The chief executive now believes tighter integration will benefit Facebook’s entire “family of apps” over the long term by making them more useful, the person said. Mr. Zuckerberg had floated the integration idea for months and began promoting it more heavily to employees toward the end of last year, the people said.
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton recently spoke out to discuss why he quit Facebook and reveal what he learned about Mark Zuckerberg whilst working with him. Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19 billion in 2014, but Acton and his new bosses reportedly clashed heads about the direction the messaging app should take. He revealed disagreements with Zuck and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg over how to make money from the messaging service before he left the company in an interview with Forbes. The social network was allegedly interested in showing adverts to Whatsapp users, whilst the app’s founders wanted to introduce tough encryption which would stop the harvesting of users’ data. Eventually, the situation came to a head and Acton quit in November 2017.
‘At the end of the day, I sold my company,’ Acton said. ‘I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.’ Although Acton said Zuck ‘isn’t the bad guy’ and is one of a team of ‘good businesspeople’ who ‘represent a set of business practices, principles and ethics, and policies that he don’t necessarily agree with’, his description of a final meeting with the billionaire is brutally awkward. He said:
‘This is probably the last time you’ll ever talk to me,’ Acton added. Despite working close to Zuck, the Whatsapp co-founder said he was inscrutable and added: ‘I couldn’t tell you much about the guy’.
In March, Acton tweeted his support for an anti-Facebook campaign amid growing outrage over the social media giant’s links to controversial British data firm Cambridge Analytica. He wrote: ‘It is time. #DeleteFacebook.’
Earlier this week, the founders of Instagram also quit Facebook to become the latest high-profile employees to step down from the helm of Zuck-owned companies. Kevin Systrom, chief executive and Mike Krieger, chief technical officer, plan to leave the company in the next few weeks and take time off ‘to explore our curiosity and creativity again’.
What are your thoughts on the intergration?
