MUMBAI: While there is an ongoing global outrage against the plans of Facebook to integrate WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is confident that the move will be in the best interest of the users. However, it is going to be a long-term project that might extend to 2020 or beyond.
Speaking during an earning’s call announcing Facebook's fourth quarter results, Zuckerberg stated, “I can talk about messaging and the integration that we're thinking about, but first, we're really early in thinking through this. So there's a lot more that we need to figure out before we finalise the plans. And then, of course, this is going to be a long-term project that I think will probably be to whatever extent we end up doing it in - a 2020 thing or beyond.”
He also added, “There are a few big reasons why I'm excited about this and think it'll be good for the user experience, which is the reason that we're doing it. I mean, part of the question was about a commercial benefit, but that really isn't the big focus here. The first reason that I'm excited about this is moving more to end-to-end encryption by default in more of our products.”
Mark noted that people ‘really like’ the encryption function in WhatsApp and he thinks that to have encryption work in a consistent way across will prove beneficiary. “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,” he said.
The Facebook CEO emphasised on this matter by citing the example of its popular marketplace feature. He said, “A lot of people are using Marketplace on Facebook now. And a lot of people are using that in countries where WhatsApp is the primary messaging app that they use. So we have these experiences today where we're building Marketplace and you go to message someone to buy something. And the link to basically do the messaging is over Messenger, but in that country, where people really want to be using it, is WhatsApp and we need to make it so that people can communicate across the different networks and graphs that they have or be able to do that integration better in order to facilitate more transactions and connections there.”
