Welcome to the Tech Meam Ride Home for Friday, January 25th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, now the AIs can defeat us at Starcraft 2.

Zuckerberg wants to unify his collection of messaging apps,

my grand unifying theory for the streaming video wars,

and of course the weekend long reads suggestions.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Mike Isaac is reporting in the New York Times that Mark Zuckerberg plans to integrate the various messaging services of Facebook's three most popular apps.

What's-AP, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are all currently completely separate platforms, essentially,

even and perhaps especially on the code and back end level.

But, quote, while all three services will continue operating as

standalone apps, their underlying messaging infrastructure will be

unified, the people said. Facebook is still in the early stages of the work and plans to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020, they said.

By stitching the app's infrastructure together, Mr Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users

highly engaged inside its ecosystem.

If people turn more regularly to Facebook-owned properties for texting, they may forego rival messaging services such as those from

Apple and Google, said the people who declined to be identified because the moves

are confidential. If users interact more frequently with Facebook's apps, the company may also be able to build up its advertising business or add new services to make money, they said, end quote.

So yes, this makes sense. If you have one unified platform, it would be easier to monetize without asking

advertisers to spend across multiple platforms. There's definitely that, but there's also this, quoting Casey Newton on Twitter, quote,

Now if the government ever tries to force Facebook to spin off Instagram and

what's-app, it can throw its hands up and protest that it's actually all just one big app.

Ruthless as ever, end quote.

...