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The messy details behind Facebook?s messaging plans


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The New York Times
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The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254715/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messaging-plan-single-encrypted-ephemeral-news-feed
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Summary

But the plan Zuckerberg described Wednesday goes further, changing how those apps interact with protocols like SMS and how we use our phones to send messages in general.Zuckerberg laid out the basics of the plan in Facebook’s new “Interoperability” principle: “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 didn’t give a lot of details on how all this would work, and there’s a lot we just don’t know — but the basic idea was a single catchall system for all the messages you get on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And since Facebook controls the backend for all three apps, it can store more complex metadata, like which app will send you a notification when a WhatsFaceGram message comes through. As Zuckerberg described it: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 … You can imagine many simple experiences — a person discovers a business on Instagram and easily transitions to their preferred messaging app for secure payments and customer support; another person wants to catch up with a friend and can send them a message that goes to their preferred app without having to think about where that person prefers to be reached; or you simply post a story from your day across both Facebook and Instagram and can get all the replies from your friends in one place.Of course, things get more complicated when you try to include protocols like SMS, but there are a couple of clear precedents Facebook could follow. He also suggests it would be nice to extend features like encryption to standards-based messaging, although it’s not clear if Facebook is actually putting its weight behind a new carrier-adopted messaging standard or if Zuckerberg is just flagging a problem so we don’t get mad when it pops up later.The biggest problem for the proposed scheme is something Zuckerberg only touches on briefly.

As said here by Russell Brandom