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SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook began allowing people to use the Instagram photo-sharing app and the Messenger messaging app to communicate with each other on Wednesday, as part of a planned integration of the social network’s top messaging apps.
With the changes, people who use Instagram can now send photos, videos or text messages to those who use Facebook Messenger, and vice versa. The two apps had worked separately, with no direct communication between them. Facebook said it would also add about 10 features to Instagram that were previously exclusive to Messenger, such as group video viewing sessions, a short-lived messaging mode, and “selfie stickers.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, announced last year that he planned to merge the company’s three messaging apps, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, noting that more people were communicating privately online. That’s a marked difference from the early days of Facebook, when users posted on their digital “walls.”
“Basically, we’re giving people the ability to do something that everyone wants to do through apps,” Stan Chudnovsky, vice president of Messenger at Facebook, said in an interview.
More than 100 billion messages are sent every day through the Facebook family of applications, Chudnovsky said. That far exceeds the roughly 24 billion SMS text messages exchanged daily by mobile operators at their peak around 2015.
Lawmakers and regulators have raised concerns that Zuckerberg’s integration plan is part of a strategy to prevent authorities from breaking Facebook. The company is under intense antitrust scrutiny, especially from its acquisitions of smaller rivals over the years; its critics have argued that Facebook essentially neutralized competitive threats. Last month, Zuckerberg answered questions under oath as part of a Federal Trade Commission investigation into whether Facebook had violated antitrust laws.
The opportunity in messaging is huge. Much of the world has been carved out according to the messaging platform, and regional players tend to dominate. Japan’s Line, for example, is the most popular service in the country, while Tencent’s WeChat is ubiquitous in China.
But the United States has been an anomaly. Americans tend to have three or more messaging apps on their smartphones, Chudnovsky said, citing Facebook research. One in three users in the US also loses track of conversation threads in apps in use, he said.
The integration of Instagram, Messenger and eventually WhatsApp, which is more difficult due to how the encrypted service works, Chudnovsky said, will also help Facebook protect itself from its competitors. Apple is one of the biggest communication facilitators, with iMessage installed on all iPhones. Google is stepping up its efforts by supporting a broad-based messaging language designed to work on different mobile phones and cell phone operators. And Signal, the encrypted messaging app, has gained traction in recent years.
As part of the integration, the 10 new Instagram features (expanded colors and stickers for chat messages, animated message effects, and more) will be powered by the Messenger infrastructure.
Facebook also plans to introduce Watch Together, which allows people to watch videos or movies within Messenger while on a video call with friends or family. The product is similar to those of different media companies, including one featured by Disney on Tuesday on its Disney + video streaming app. Facebook has heavily promoted group video chats since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
For now, the integration of Instagram and Messenger will slowly roll out to people in some countries; Facebook did not specify where. Users in those countries, a subset of the more than two billion people who use the applications, will be able to decide whether to opt for the new integrated services.
