Inside Facebook’s Quadruple Play: How the Company Is Finally Melding Its Apps
The social behemoth is weaving together Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp even as watchdogs and regulators close in. No big deal: Only democracy hangs in the balance.
By Harry McCracken
Stan Chudnovsky doesn’t remember when CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives began talking about treating the company’s portfolio of services more like, well, a portfolio. The current VP for Facebook’s Messenger service simply recalls that the company’s original tendency to keep Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp pretty much separate started to feel increasingly unwieldy as user numbers for each surged well past the billion mark. Instead of continuing to silo off each app, execs concluded that “we can serve people better if the experiences we are building are a little bit more interconnected,” Chudnovsky says. “That truth [had] been ringing in our ears for a long time. What was never obvious is how would we exactly go about it, and how would we prioritize it.”
To kick-start the process, Zuckerberg did what he often does: He posted about it on Facebook. On March 6, 2019, he shared a 3,219-word manifesto titled “A Privacy-Focused…
