Facebook is planning to merge WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, bringing together more than 2.6 billion users so that they can communicate over the three platforms, the New York Times reports. The effort will require the social media giant to rewrite the basic software of the three apps so that they are interoperable. The plan, which is in its early stages, would take thousands of Facebook employees about a year to complete. Messages would incorporate end-to-end encryption, ensuring that only the users participating in such conversations would see them.

Cross-platform messaging may also lead the way for businesses on one platform to message potential customers on another. And it might make it easier for Facebook to share data across the three platforms, to help its targeted advertising efforts. But bigger still: it makes Facebook’s suite of apps a much tighter, interwoven collection of services. That could make the key parts of Facebook’s empire more difficult to break up and spin off, if governments and regulators decide that is necessary.

Shared data: Mr Zuckerberg is reportedly pushing the integration plan to make its trinity of services more useful and increase the amount of time people spend on them. By effectively joining all its users into one massive group Facebook could compete more effectively with Google’s messaging services and Apple’s iMessage, suggested Makena Kelly on tech news site The Verge. “We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private,” said Facebook in a statement. “We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks,” it added.