Home > News

Facebook, Instagram Will Share Chat and Video Features

By Laura Tucker
News Facebook Instagram Chat Featured

Facebook snatched up competitor Instagram several years back, and it may be the smartest move the social network ever made. Now instead of working independently, they will work together, a move that will dominate the business. The company announced this week that Facebook and Instagram will now work alongside each other and will share features such as chat.

Updates to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger

After an update, Instagram will begin announcing to users that it’s adding a chat function that will include emoji, changing chat color, etc. But the chat and other features won’t be limited to just Instagram, as users will also be able to chat with other Facebook users, too.

What this change will do is limit the reasons Facebook and Instagram users have of leaving to use other apps. Users will be able to chat cross-platform whether they have both apps or not.

They will not have to opt in to using the apps together, however. An expanded set of privacy tools is being offered. Users can specify who can reach them in the chat, who is sent to the Message Request folder, and who is not able to reach them at all. Instagram users who choose to not chat with users on Facebook can turn the feature off.

News Facebook Instagram Chat Both

There will be a new Accounts Center in the service, an addition that started being rolled out this week on Facebook. It allows users to opt out of a number of different features.

Users on Instagram and Facebook’s Messenger apps will be able to block and report unwanted messages on phone calls as needed as before, but now full conversations can be reported and not just single messages. Minors’ accounts will be first to get the “Safety Notices” feature in Messenger.

The platforms themselves aren’t merging. You won’t see your Instagram chats in Messenger or vice versa. Instagram messages and calls will remain in the Instagram app, but messages from Facebook users will appear there as well.

Beyond Chatting,?h2>

These changes were tested with a small group of users over the summer. Along with the chat feature, Facebook and Instagram users will be able to watch videos together, and soon Reels as well.

News Facebook Instagram Chat Option

Additionally, there will be an option to make messages disappear with a “Vanish Mode” option. Selfie Stickers will be offered as well to change a chat’s colors, and custom emoji reactions and animated effects will be offered as well.

These changes are rolling out already. There are also plans in the future to include WhatsApp into the cross-platform sharing and chatting, leaving even more reason for users to not leave the Facebook-owned collection of apps.

If you want to keep everything private on Instagram, read on to learn how to prevent other Instagram users from finding you.

Image Credit: New Messaging Features for Instagram and public domain

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.