Facebook plans to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is planning to integrate the messaging services of its three major social media apps- WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger by the year 2020, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The move requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels, the report said citing four people are involved in the effort.

All the three services will however be expected to continue operating as stand-alone apps, the integration would allow for communication between the services. A WhatsApp user, for example, would be able to send encrypted message to someone who has only a Facebook  Messenger or Instagram, according to the NYT report.

Facebook said it is working on making more of its messaging products end-to-end encrypted, and considering ways to make it easier for users to connect across networks.

End-to-end encryption protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation.

“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,” a spokesperson said.

For its part, Facebook told The NYT that it hopes to “build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.” It added: “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.”