Facebook plans to integrate its messaging services on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

While all three will remain stand-alone apps, at a much deeper level, they will be linked so messages can travel between the different services.

Facebook told the BBC it was at the start of a “long process”.

The plan was first reported in the New York Times and is believed to be a personal project of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Once complete, the merger would mean that a Facebook user could communicate directly with someone who only has a WhatsApp account. This is currently impossible as the applications have no common core.

The work to merge the three elements has already begun, reported the NYT, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2019 or early next year.

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.

The statement said there was a lot of “discussion and debate” about how the system would eventually work.

Linking the three systems marks a significant change at Facebook as before now it has let Instagram and WhatsApp operate as largely independent companies.