Consolidation of Instagram and Facebook Messaging
Facebook introduced new functionality that allows Instagram and Messenger users to communicate across apps. For example, users can chat with their Facebook friends from the Instagram app, even if their friends are not on Instagram and vice versa. Combined with the additional features introduced to Instagram that mimicks Facebook messenger, the company is pushing users to get the consolidation upgrade. These new features aim to ‘lock’ users inside Facebook’s social network. If an Instagram user doesn’t want to hear from anyone on Facebook, they can turn this feature off.
This is relevant to the social network and web graphs sections of our class. First of all, Facebook users can be represented with a network graph- the users are the nodes, and the path between them indicates a friendship. This new feature attempts to increase the giant component of users on Facebook by creating new paths to people who weren’t reachable from a single app. It increased the ease of creating new paths between nodes as it allows people to reach people through a messaging app that the other person may not even be on. It will also increase the embeddedness of specific nodes, and as a result, there will be fewer nodes acting as local bridges.
However, I found most interesting that this new tool adds a ‘direction’ into the social network, giving it asymmetric qualities like web-graphs. Because the apps now allow people to message people across platforms, regardless of whether they are on both apps and not, messages now have a direction- From Facebook to Instagram or Instagram to Facebook. This means that the messages sent between users resemble a web graph. The new feature then aims to increase the size of strongly connected components where every node can reach every node with no node being part of a larger set. Moreover, users can prevent people from reaching them across platforms, giving them the power to remove particular links or paths.
It’s interesting to see how Facebook utilizes network effects to instill loyalty within its user base. The more extensive and more embedded, the connected components are, the better. I am looking forward to seeing how the users receive this integration. This newfound ease of reaching people or being reached may or may not be a good thing to them.