The Social Network with 1.3 billion users and the messaging app evaluated 700 million, is moving towards a common platform: an online screenshot shows the potentials of this integration.
Indeed, it seems that Facebook is planning to unify the access to the social network and WhatsApp, the popular chat App owned by them. On the Internet a new function appeared, which seems almost a test, and redirects to the page of the social network where there is a screen asking you to give permission to WhatsApp. If this “joint venture” were to happen, would be born a giant database that includes the billion and three hundred million active Facebook users and the 700 million of WhatsApp.
A single platform – Until now the companies have not yet confirmed the operation, but on the web you can find the subdomain alpha.whatsapp.com network, where there is a link that allows access to the service using your account on the social network. By logging in a link that leads within Facebook will open, asking to authenticate an application entitled WhatsApp SSO, or Single Sign On – the procedure used to allow users a single login to multiple websites and applications. So you use your Facebook username and password to use WhatsApp. The integration between the two platforms would simplify the access allowing to share, for example, the list of friends and the address book. In this way, the phone book of users could end within the social network, with the birth of a single large set in which both WhatsApp and Facebook contacts will be gathered. It will be enormous: Facebook which has nearly half a billion active users – and WhatsApp’s personal directories – which has 700 million users.
Since the news was given by the German edition of Focus, users and experts have made numerous assumptions. The goal of the operation could be a partnership with Messenger, the app that handles the internal Facebook messaging both on tablets and smartphones and that allows VoIP calls, to which WhatsApp is aiming. According to others WhatsApp aims to become more and more a hybrid program, ie giving the opportunity to log in with no need for a phone number, increasing the number of users of the app by opening the way for a subsequent merger with Messenger. Among the most reliable hypothesis there is one that talks about the integration as a way to improve the login process to WhatsApp Web: the access to the service would be done through the social network and not via the current QRCode, facilitating the operation.
WhatsApp was purchased by the company of Mark Zuckerberg a year ago for $19 billion and every day on the platform there are over 30 billion messages. The chat is booming, after the release of the web version for Android users and the approaching of the VoIP call function, is creating a strong competion to popular services such as Skype.