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Facebook to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger

Facebook plans to integrate its messaging services on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, reports the New York Times.

While all three will remain stand-alone apps, at a much deeper level they will be linked so messages can travel between the different services.

Facebook told the BBC it was at the start of the “long process”.

The paper reports that the plan is a personal project of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Once complete, the merger would mean that a Facebook user could communicate with someone who only has a WhatsApp account. This is currently impossible as the applications have no common core.

The work to merge the three elements has begun, reported the NYT, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2019 or early next year.

Mr Zuckerberg is reportedly pushing the integration plan to make its trinity of services more useful and increase the amount of time people spend on them.

“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private,” said Facebook in a statement.

“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,” it added.

The statement said there was a lot of “discussion and debate” about how the system would eventually work.

Source: BBC