Facebook recently revealed plans to merge your WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger threads so you could easily message people across these services, and now CEO Mark Zuckerberg has laid out his rationale for making this controversial move.
Facebook is reportedly planning to integrate chats from its three major properties: WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
This was reported Friday by The New York Times. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the report's findings via a written statement to the newspaper.
The different chats should be merged sometime in 2020.
According to sources, Facebook's boss and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently summoned WhatsApp employees to announce the merging of the company's messagings services.
They balked at the plan, the article reads:
On December 7, employees gathered around microphones at WhatsApp’s offices to ask Mr. Zuckerberg why he was so invested in merging the services. Some said his answers were vague and meandering. Several WhatsApp employees have left or plan to leave because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans, the people said.
If Facebook proceeds with the plan, customers will be able to start a chat with another user irrespective of whether they're on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram. As an example, a Messenger user could start chatting with a friend of Instagram, or vice versa. In another instance, a WhatsApp user would be able to chat directly with a contact on Instagram.
From the article:
By stitching the apps’ infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users highly engaged inside its ecosystem. If people turn more regularly to Facebook-owned properties for texting, they may forgo rival messaging services, such as those from Apple and Google, said the people, who declined to be identified because the moves are confidential.
Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp will remain separate apps: the company will not merge them into a unified mega-app for chatting.
This integration would include end-to-end encryption to protect communications as the messages are transmitted between the three different chat services.
It was however unclear at post time how this would work in practice considering that people go by their real name on Facebook versus the anonymity that Instagram and WhatsApp provide.
Today, WhatsApp requires people to register only a phone number to sign up for the service. By contrast, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their real identities. Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer keeping their use of each app compartmentalized.
Is this a good idea, do you think?
Let us know in the comments!
You can now share your favorite movies and television shows on Netflix to your Instagram Stories. That's because the video-streaming company today updated its mobile app for iPhone and iPad with tappable artwork when watching movies or TV shows.
According to Variety, sharing your favorite movies and television shows from Netflix on Instagram Stories is pretty straightforward. Just select the title of your choice within Netflix's iOS app and use the Share feature to send it to Instagram, just like that.
From there, you can add the artwork to a Story or share it directly with your contacts. Netflix artworks in Instagram Stories also link back to Netflix.
This feature works with both original and licensed content.
We’re always on the lookout for ways to make it easier for members to share the Netflix titles they’re obsessing about and help them discover something new to watch. We hope our members enjoy this new feature!
This is possible thanks to Instagram's Stories API that became available in May 2018. Some of the other apps that take advantage of Instagram integration include Spotify and Soundcloud.
This feature is available in Instagram for iOS starting today. They're working on bringing this integration to Android but no time frame was provided at press time.
Will you be using this feature?
Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Instagram's begun rolling out a multi-account upload feature which permits users of the photo-sharing service to publish feed posts to different accounts they control at the same time.
In October, iDownloadBlog was among first to report on Instagram's horizontally scrolling design for posts in the Explore tab. That test has now expanded to the main feed, with a huge number of users in the UK and elsewhere spotting it on Thursday afternoon.
You share your Instagram Stories with friends, family, and others you know. But that doesn’t mean you want your stories shared with people you’ve never met.
Here’s how to prevent people from sharing your Instagram Stories with others in the app and on the website.
After launching video chat in its built-in messaging feature, aptly named Direct, earlier this summer, Facebook-owned Instagram today began rolling out voice messages.
If you frequently use the official Instagram app on your jailbroken iPhone, then you might have something to gain from using a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed InstaNotifyFilter by iOS developer midkin.
As you might have already inferred from the tweak’s name, InstaNotifyFilter filters some of the more extraneous notifications you might receive in the Instagram app, and citing the tweak’s description, it specifically targets the following:
If you’re a frequent Instagram user, then you’ve probably gotten accustomed to the 60-second upload limit that prevents you from sharing longer videos to the platform from your mobile device. Fortunately, jailbreakers can now circumvent this silly restriction with a new free jailbreak tweak called IG Video by iOS developer pxcex.
After you install IG Video, you’ll be able to upload videos longer than 60 seconds to your Instagram account, which means the prompt you see in the screenshot example above no longer has any bearing over what you can upload to Instagram.
The free, open sourced Windowed app is a handy browser that lets you upload content to Instagram, view posts and manage your accounts, all from your Mac or Windows PC desktop.
At long last, the photo-sharing service Instagram has announced that its algorithm will be deleting inauthentic likes and follows that those fitness trainers and life coaches you've been following have bought from specialized services.
While Facebook-owned Instagram back in August did confirm that it had been hard at work developing a brand-new activity dashboard feature that would show how much time you spent on the service, the promised rollout got delayed. Today, Instagram has finally started rolling out its own Screen Time-like feature, dubbed Your Activity.