Facebook Is Hard At Work To Merge Its Family Of Messaging Apps: Zuckerberg

Stressing that the messaging experience in the US is very fragmented compared to India or China, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company is working hard to merge Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp so that they can start to function a little bit more like one connected interoperable system.

In a bid to allow cross-messaging among its family of apps, Facebook has reportedly started merging Instagram and Messenger chats. The social network has already integrated Messenger rooms with WhatsApp on the Web.

"There's more work to happen here. We of course, want to bring in WhatsApp to that interoperability as well. There are more features we want to add even to the Messenger, Instagram interoperability," Zuckerberg told analysts during the company's earnings call on Thursday.

"It's good to see this starting to roll out after what has been a pretty large engineering and infrastructure project," he added.

Private messaging continues to be one of the fastest-growing forms of communication, now with roughly 100 billion messages exchanged every day on WhatsApp alone.

"But these conversations are still often fragmented across different apps, and people tell us that they want to be able to use the app they like best to reach everyone who they want to message," The Facebook CEO noted.

"To address this, we've been working on a long-term infrastructure project to let people message across apps, and we've now started rolling out an update to Instagram that brings the best features from Messenger and creates a better messaging experience across both apps, and early feedback has been positive so far".

The world of social media is soon going to change as Zuckerberg inches closer to fulfill his dream of integrating all his services into one cross-platform movement of personal data.

More than the commercial benefits of the chat integration between the apps, he has been more concerned about data encryption.

People can now access Messenger Rooms which allow group video calls of up to 50 people with no time limit via WhatsApp on the desktop.

The Messenger Rooms integration is yet to arrive on WhatsApp on mobile.

--IANS

na/

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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