A unified messaging platform for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram won't be happening before 2020
With a global outrage over the company's plan to integrate chats between Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg went on to say that this won't be happening any time soon and would be a long term project.
After Facebook announced the fourth-quarter earnings on late Wednesday, the company CEO said that they were early in processes of the integration plan.
Facebook CEO said, "There's a lot more that we need to figure out before we finalize the plans. 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 went on to say that the data encryption would be of bigger concern for the company than the commercial benefits of the chat integration between the apps.
"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.
"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.
With Facebooks plans of integrating the chat services of WhatsApp, Messenger and photo-sharing app Instagram, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Monday warned the company asking it to provide with an "urgent briefing" on the proposals.
"The Irish DPC will be very closely scrutinizing Facebook's plans as they develop, particularly insofar as they involve the sharing and merging of personal data between different Facebook companies," DPC said in a statement.
According to the Facebook CEO, the idea is to let people utilise the apps to enhance the experience.
"Hundreds of millions 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".
"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," said Zuckerberg.
He went on to say that he believed strongly in trying to decentralize and put power in the hands of the individuals.
"One of the ways that we're talking about decentralization is through end-to-end encryption in messaging," he added.
(With IANS inputs)
