New Delhi: Taking another step towards monetising and making all its apps – WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram – into one unified experience for billions of users, the social networking giant has added ‘WhatsApp from Facebook’ for new users on its instant messaging platform in the New Year.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his plans last year to integrate its chat services – WhatsApp, Messenger and photo-sharing app Instagram – to let their users message each other across platforms.
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Calling it a long-term project, Zuckerberg said the cross-app functionality will happen in 2020 or beyond.
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The new feature was spotted by WABetaInfo, a fan website that tracks WhatsApp updates, on Thursday.
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“WhatsApp from Facebook is added to the WhatsApp Status for newly registered users!’ posted the website.
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A follower replied: “This is a feature that they know how to implement faster!”
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WhatsApp in September quietly rolled out a feature for Android users to let them share their status stories directly on Facebook Story and other apps.
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Just like Instagram, WhatsApp’s status stories lets users post images, text and videos on your profile that disappear after 24 hours.
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Facebook’s video calling device Portal also works with just a WhatsApp account, allowing users to make video calls to friends and family and access features like ‘Story Time’ even if they don’t have a Facebook account.
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According to Zuckerberg, more than the commercial benefits of the chat integration between the apps, he was concerned about data encryption.
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“The first reason that I’m excited about this is moving more to end-to-end encryption by default in more of our products. People really like this in WhatsApp. I think it’s the direction that we should be going in with more things in the future,” he told analysts during a conference call.
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“There are also a number of cases that we see where people tell us that they want to be able to message across the different services,” Zuckerberg noted.
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The move could let the social networking giant tout higher user engagement to advertisers, further ramping up its advertising division.
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