More than two billion people on Earth use an application from the "Facebook family of services" every day. Behind this name lies this reality: "We estimate that each month, more than 2.6 billion people use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger, and that more than two billion people use at least one of these services every day ," according to the results published by Facebook in October 2018 .
While this titanic ecosystem now exists across several separate apps, these Facebook-owned services often overlap in the features they offer. This is the case with private chats between users: a feature that is at the heart of the WhatsApp and Messenger apps, and more discreetly in Instagram.
“Independent applications with unified technical infrastructures”
According to an investigation published by the New York Times on Friday, January 25, this redundancy could lead Facebook to review the way these applications work and communicate with each other. The American daily, based on anonymous testimonies within Facebook, announces that WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger "will continue to operate as independent applications, but their technical infrastructures will be unified" , as part of a project initiated by Mark Zuckerberg himself and scheduled to be completed in 2020.
Questioned by several media outlets, including Le Monde , Facebook did not deny these claims, with a company spokesperson explaining:
“We want to build the best messaging experience possible; and people want to be able to use messaging that’s fast, simple, reliable, and respects privacy. (…) We’re thinking about how we can make it easier to chat with friends and family across our networks. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of discussion and debate about these topics as we begin the long process of figuring out how this all works in detail.”
The stakes are indeed potentially colossal. "This plan will require thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure the way WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger work at their most basic levels ," writes the New York Times . While the concrete consequences of such a "unification" remain to be determined, the American daily gives as an example, based on anonymous testimonies from Facebook, the case of a person posting a classified ad on the Facebook Marketplace site (the equivalent of the Leboncoin site on Facebook): with the new technical infrastructure in place, conversations around the item for sale could take place indifferently through WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger.
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