Facebook Will Let Users Chat Across Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp (engadget.com) 53
An anonymous reader shares a report: There were rumors that Facebook was going to make its messaging products interoperable, but now it appears they're about to be a reality. At F8, Messenger's head of consumer product Asha Sharma said that in the future, users will soon be able to send messages across Facebook's three different messaging platforms: Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. "We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere," she said.
Re: (Score:2)
And add chat back to the Facebook app rather than requiring a second app.
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LOL, it's a crazy idea but it just might work.
Anyone Anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
"We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere", as long as "anywhere" is inside our walled garden where we can troll for advertising data.
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"We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere", as long as "anywhere" is inside our walled garden where we can troll for advertising data.
It's possible Asha Sharma doesn't know anything exists outside Facebook -- cults are like that.
And not just talk.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And then went on to say: "And wherever people choose to talk, we believe that we should be able to listen."
Re: (Score:1)
Great (Score:3)
Make the following moves then:
1. Place the central messenger servers under the rotating (5 year?) control of a non-profit organization such as Mozilla, Apache, or Wikipedia.
2. All protocols utilize end-to-end encryption.
3. Protocol must be published as an open standard.
Users can be free to use any (well behaved) third-party client to connect to those services. The producers of those clients will be strongly encouraged (not to mention incentivized to donate to the organization that is running the central server).
XMPP (Score:5, Insightful)
"We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere"
Which is *EXACTLY* why Facebook disabled access to XMPP... oh... wait...
Very handy (Score:2)
Now I can ignore chat across multiple apps just by opening one, very useful! Thanks!
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Now I can ignore chat across multiple apps just by opening one, very useful! Thanks!
Exactly what I thought- now I can ignore them all at once. Super innovative idea and I'm all for it.
DANGER Will Robinson!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way those three will inter-operate is if end-to-end encryption is added to messenger and instagram OR, it is removed from WhatsApp.
Guess which one Facebook is most inclined to do?!?
This is seeming like a good time to start telling friends to install Signal [signal.org].
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The only way those three will inter-operate is if end-to-end encryption is added to messenger and instagram OR, it is removed from WhatsApp. Guess which one Facebook is most inclined to do?!?
TFA already answers your question. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
This interoperability is just one of many features of the new Messenger. All messages will also be end-to-end encrypted, which is part of Facebook's recent privacy-focused mantra.
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Because Facebook and Zuck have never ever lied about issues of privacy or security...
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This is seeming like a good time to start telling friends to install Signal [signal.org].
No!!!!! Please do not do this! It is not self hosted and not federated!
Install Synapse by Matrix.org ~ It is a Python based chat server
Source here: https://github.com/matrix-org/... [github.com]
The best client is Riot.im available here https://about.riot.im/ [about.riot.im]
The client is available to use as a webapp / website but also an electrum app for Android, iOS, OS X, and Windows and is open source.
It has full end-to-end encryption. Even forces you to approve new devices as they sign in.
Tox or Jabber/XMPP+OMEMO (Score:1)
Those are the best options today. I don't know about Tox's security and reliability, but it is the most featureful with cross platform clients.
Jabber/XMPP itself is quite well supported, but OMEMO support is inconsistent across platforms. OTR had decent support, but thanks to some clients dropping it in favor of OMEMO rather than supporting both, it is now a message of picking interoperable clients features and registering on a server. From that point of view Tox is better. But Tox is filtered in some count
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Guess which one Facebook is most inclined to do?!?
Add the encryption to Messenger and Instagram. No need to guess, that has already been announced.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/... [theverge.com]
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01... [techcrunch.com]
Make it harder to break us up (Score:2)
Yeah, right. (Score:2)
Yeah, right.
People "should be able to talk to anyone, anywhere", but they killed XMPP connectivity [slashdot.org].
Tell me about it ;)
Able to place ads to anyone anywhere (Score:1)
No ad company is going to give you something for free that's "private".
Your use of any service is a product.
Interoperability is more than that (Score:2)
Interoperability, but... (Score:2)
You say it's a feature, I call it a privacy bug (Score:2)
You're the product, not the consumer.
Really? (Score:3)
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
So this is the company that - online - has a social media network and messenger integrated.
Then they released an app (the largest app of any I've ever seen) that's just the social media network, that then forces you to install ANOTHER app to get the messenger functionality.
And if you access the social network website on a mobile device, it STILL tries to shove you towards a separate app for messaging UNLESS you put the browser into "desktop mode" where it then lets you check for messages.
Then they bought another messaging app that works totally differently and independent of any social network.
And *now*, after many years, they expect me to believe that they're going to lump all the messaging functionality together, in a single app?
Yeah, okay. You could have done that nearly 10 years ago and, you know what, I might then have used you for messaging family because it would be convenient. But your deliberate extraction of messaging functionality to an entirely different app to the app that shows me the links that are in those messages (e.g. to people's Facebook posts) just killed that, which is probably one of the reasons that your own messaging didn't take off.
Not to mention THE DAMN SIZE of the app, that just grows unchecked and literally filled up at least two of my friend's phones within days of them buying a new phone and just using it to browse around Facebook. They just uninstalled the whole thing after that.
Now you're gonna lump WhatsApp functionality into Messenger or vice versa? Yeah, good luck. If there's one thing guaranteed to kill off Whatsapp and drive people to the next service, it's messing about with it like that.
Reduced Security? (Score:3)
One of the great security features of WhatsApp is that it requires the key stored on your phone to decrypt messages so facebook doesn't have the key. Messenger needs to work for people who don't have phones on desktop browsers which don't have secure storage for encryption keys.
Short of making messenger users type in a passphrase to use the application I'm not sure how they retain the high degree of security while making them interoperable.
cackles, rubs hands together (Score:1)