“Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication,” Zuckerberg continued in the March post. By recruiting businesses and brands to message users about promotions and by decreasing the friction of in-message purchases, Facebook stands to make well over the roughly $55 per user it paid to acquire WhatsApp in 2014. “We plan to start by making it possible for you to send messages to your contacts using any of our services, and then to extend that interoperability to SMS too.”ĭoubling down on messaging could prove to be a lucrative decision in the long run. “People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely,” he wrote in a blog post.

In an announcement earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s plan for a shift toward end-to-end encrypted, ephemeral messaging, in accordance with the social network’s new interoperability principle. (WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion active monthly users, while Messenger and Instagram have over 1.3 billion and 1 billion, respectively.) The New York Times reported in January that the technical infrastructure underlying all three services will be integrated, potentially redefining how over three billion people around the world communicate. The change might anticipate the forthcoming unification of Facebook’s various messaging properties, which include WhatsApp and Instagram as well as Messenger.

In addition to phone numbers, photos and names were accepted as forms of login identification. Perhaps owing to a bug, they say they’ve encountered an error message indicating that their account has been restricted.įacebook rolled out the ability to sign up for Messenger sans account in June 2015, first for users in the U.S., Canada, Peru, and Venezuela. Some Messenger users without Facebook accounts report that the transition hasn’t gone smoothly.

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