It is not a secret that Facebook has bought the services such as Instagram, WhatsApp and separated Messenger with a plan to integrate them all down the line. Last year at its annual developer conference, Facebook even revealed their plans to integrate all these three services in order to make them work together.
At that time, there was a massive uproar from everyone saying that Facebook is too much in control of everyone’s data but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Because of the pandemic, we feel that Facebook’s plans have been slightly delayed otherwise we would have seen WhatsApp and Instagram inside Facebook Messenger by now.
However, it is better late than never because the first signs of Facebook’s services integration are here. In the latest update to Instagram, the Instagram Direct messages that let Instagram users chat with fellow users on the platform has been merged with Messenger. This means that to chat on Instagram, you will have to use Facebook Messenger as well. Now, this could happen for WhatsApp as well but it will be different because WhatsApp is a chat app in itself so they can’t move it to Messenger.
On the face of it, this is great which lets one app that is Messenger work for chatting across all the platforms from Facebook such as Facebook, Instagram and maybe WhatsApp too. But the problem is that there are a lot of people who don’t have a Facebook account and don’t want it too. In this manner, Facebook is forcing them to create an account because you need to have one to use Messenger.
We will see how this all pans out and how the Instagram experiment goes with merger of Messenger and it will also determine the future course of action for the company.