Direct messaging service has now come to Instagram on the desktop. Instagram started testing this feature for select users on Wednesday. This announcement came from the CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. He has tweeted that they hope to bring the direct messaging facility soon to everyone. There have been reports online from February 2019.
“For those of you into your DMs, today we start to test Direct on the desktop web. Now, it’s only a small percentage of people for now — we need to make sure it works well — but we hope to bring this to everyone soon,” he tweeted.
The ‘direct on web’ messaging won’t offer any different experience than what you are used to on the Instagram app. Whatever you have been doing with the app, like sharing photos, starting a new conversation and responding to existing messages. It is hoped that the businesses which use their Instagram account to promote their products/services would be able to make appropriate use of the facility.
Based on the statements by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company aims at integrating the messaging applications of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct into a single inbox. This move at launching the web version of the Instagram Direct can possibly a move towards this direction, though there is no confirmation on this.
There is however another take on this. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US is already looking into the way the different offerings are reached to the customers by Facebook in the form of an antitrust inquiry. Facebook does not have the approval from FTC to merge its different messaging applications.
Experts are also not convinced why it took Facebook so long to roll out the Direct Messaging to the web.