What You Need To Know As Facebook Plans To Merge WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Messaging by Kimberly Jean Fricke

1. What You Need To Know As Facebook Plans To Merge WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Messaging by Kimberly Jean Fricke Does Mark Zuckerberg love controversy? The Facebook founder recently announced the plans to merge functions of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram messaging. As you can imagine, the outcry from lovers of every platform was instant and loud. WhatsApp advocates are screaming to find out if their end-to-end encryption of messages will stay in place. It is one of the reason many users of WhatsApps chose it over the other application to start with. Instagram lovers are worried if their beloved messenger is about to die and disappear into the Facebook junk heap. Before you get too excited, let's take a closer look at what they really announced. The plans are for the back-end architecture of the 3 programs to be merged. This allows the programmers to add features and eliminate security problems on all three platforms simultaneously. The announcement states all three messengers will continue to live, but will have the added advantage of being able to speak to each other. Now, for some of you, that might be a negative, and to others, a big advantage. Right now, if you wanted to send forward a message you received on Instagram to your Facebook Messenger, it would require cutting and pasting the message, which is not easy on your phone. With the planned merger of the back-end programs, you will be able to send the message to your other account as easily as if it was another Instagram friend. That is a nice feature. What about the concern from WhatsApp users about encryption? It sounds like the current plan is to add the encryption to all 3 platforms, which would be a gain for all users.

2. Keep in mind, this is not planned to happen until late 2019, or early 2020. There will be hundreds of changes made before the final products are rolled out. Also, we may find out this plan will never take place. Already the European Union is asking for information from Facebook to explain their plan thoroughly. They have battered Facebook repeatedly about privacy concerns and the merging of the platforms has them on edge. You can expect them to look deeply into Facebook's plans and determine if it presents any privacy issues we need to know about. Even the US Senate is starting to talk about this announcement and are seeking further details to make sure it does not cause privacy concerns or hurt end-users. It is too early to tell if this announcement will be a good thing for all users, or just another way for Facebook to simplify their advertising platform. We will need to keep a close eye on what the government agencies discover as they ask Facebook for clarification. Also, we need to keep a watchful eye for further announcements from Facebook. Is this just a start of integrating platforms further, or is it just like Zuckerberg says, merging the back-ends for better efficiency? On one hand, we can be excited we will be able to share messages between platforms, but we need to pay attention to what disadvantages it may bring.