Instagram Paves the way for Integrated Messaging

Instagram has brought a long awaited feature to their platform. After years without it, users can finally DM their friends while on the web version of Instagram. It may surprise many people to know that this wasn’t already something offered by Instagram. Up until this point, people could only message their friends on the mobile app version of Instagram. This was an inconvenience for influencers, and people who have careers in working on social media.

Instagram is owned by its parent company, Facebook Inc. Facebook is currently one of the most popular social media platforms globally with 2.5 billion users, and Instagram isn’t too far behind them with a billion users of their own. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has discussed plans about integrating messaging between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. These are 3 of the biggest and most influential social media platforms available today. Integrated messaging between these 3 platforms would be a big deal.

While Instagram Direct Messaging on the web may not seem like such a big deal, this could be paving the way for the future of online communication. This is apparent by the plans that Mark Zuckerberg said, and this could be the first big step in making it a reality. Obviously the integrated communication among them will more than likely not be happening for a while, it is still an interesting concept that will probably be happening sooner than it may seem. Instagram has been doing a lot of tests, working on new features lately. Towards the end of 2018, Instagram was hoping to help prevent bullying, and as a result they tested the removal of the like feature for thousands of users. While this hasn’t been implemented globally for everyone yet, it still shows they are doing a lot of work behind the scenes. It begs the question- what else is Instagram working on that we don’t know about?