Social media giant Facebook recently announced plans to merge Messenger with its other messaging app WhatsApp and photo-sharing platform Instagram in order to create "the best messaging experiences" for the billions of users around the world who use the apps.
Although, the three apps will still remain stand-alone apps, they will be linked so that messages can travel between the different services. This means that a Facebook user could communicate directly with someone who only has a WhatsApp account, which is impossible right now.
The plan was first reported in the New York Times which also reported that it was a personal project of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
According to a spokesperson for Facebook, the company is "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."
However, the planned integration of the apps didn't go down well with WhatsApp employees, making their views known during a contentious staff meeting in December. It was even one of the major reasons all the original founders of the apps left Facebook.
Some experts too feel concerned that the merger could have an impact on people's privacy. Currently WhatsApp users are not required to provide personal information about themselves beyond their phone number to use the messaging app. But merging with Facebook Messenger and Instagram could force WhatsApp users to reveal information about themselves that they would prefer to keep private. This is already causing many users to leave Facebook. Moreover, the social networking giant have suffered a lot of hacking and data leaks over the last year, and many people can't risk having their privacy exposed like that.
Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately $1bn (£761m) in 2012, and then later took over WhatsApp in 2014 for an estimated $19.3bn. Both apps have since experienced rapid growth with Instagram having around 1 billion monthly active users and WhatsApp having 1.5 billion users.
Although, no official details have been released, the New York Times reported that the work on merging the services have already begun and it is expected to be completed by the end of this year or early next year.
What are your thoughts concerning this planned merger by Facebook? Feel free to share your opinion.
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