8 ms·

Introducing Messenger Platform and Businesses on Messenger

111 points by tayeed 12y ago

strzalek 12y ago
messenger.com must've been expensive one to acquire ;)
benaiah 12y ago
I wonder if this is why they shut off their XMPP Messenger integration earlier this spring.
- wl 12y ago
  It's not gone just yet. It has a few more weeks of life. I saw this headline and thought maybe there'd be a way to continue to use Facebook messenger in Adium. Nope. Only if you're building an "app" for iOS or Android.
  - diminoten 12y ago
    Can't someone (either from Adium or from the community) just develop a "Facebook" plugin for Adium using their "new" way of doing things? Sure, you can't use XMPP anymore, but that's okay, right?
Kronopath 12y ago
Before anyone starts thinking this stuff is super-innovative and new, let me tell you what's really going on here: Facebook wants to make Messenger into a platform in the same way the big Asian chat apps are. Things like Weixin/WeChat or LINE. I mean, just look at the most recent additions to Messenger: - Stickers. These grew in popularity starting in Asian apps. [0] - Using Messenger for payments [1] and to send money to each other [2] have been in WeChat since at least last year. - Offering "official accounts" for businesses to "chat" with customers. [3] Yep, that's there too. - And of course, sharing of messages with rich-media content from other apps. [4] To give an example, with WeChat you can pop open QQMusic (a music streaming app) and share a song with your friend that they can play and stream without leaving WeChat. All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was the reason they split Messenger from the main Facebook app in the first place. [0] http://www.wechat.com/en/features.html#emoticons http://www.wechat.com/en/features.html#emoticons [1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-brands-and-retailers/ https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-b... [2] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-between-friends/ https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-bet... [3] http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-business.html http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-busi... [4] http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments
- nashadelic 12y ago
  Innovative or not, that's not is going to determine the success of this. There has to be the ability to generate mass market adoption with innovation which Facebook is really good at.
  - ehhuang 12y ago
    just like it did with the poke app.
  - mandeepj 12y ago
    The last success Facebook had seen was with their flagship product - Facebook website, rest they bought it (whatsapp, instagram). You know how it went with apps from facebook labs. I hope you remember how big of a disaster was Facebook phone. Although, I laud their efforts of keep trying and trying.
    - GCA10 12y ago
      Ah, the voice of an older brother, taking time to criticize the little ones while urging them to try harder. I can't explain why, but your commentary makes me smile. Keep it coming!
- canistr 12y ago
  I don't think it's an either/or scenario for Facebook. Ultimately such experiences benefit the user regardless of where/when the initial innovation occurred. We've seen it over and over again. You don't need to be first or even last to the game. You just need to be the best at implementing it and your users will follow.
- sahara 12y ago
  >All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare. There's likely a third aspect: Fb (& Snapchat, et al) framing/reframing their services to be more familiar/comfortable for East Asian users as the business case makes competing in those markets increasingly appealing/unavoidable. As others have noted, the truth is probably some combination of all of the above (and then some). I doubt anyone has any idea how these concepts will play outside Asia. Snapchat has been crowing for some time now about their intentions to become Tencent West, but their success to date hinges entirely on the core offering. Is anyone—aside from strippers[0]—using Snapcash, for instance? There's definitely something fascinating about this sort of nested bundling (social recommendations within a ridesharing service within a maps app, etc.) but I don't know if there are strong indications that American/Western users want that. It seems to me that the logic is "500 million Chinese can't be wrong!"—maybe? But the West hasn't even seen one messaging platform to rule them all since AIM, lately there have been far more web/mobile unbundling success stories, and I'm not sure what would turn that tide. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/style/strippers-go-undercover-on-snapchat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/style/strippers-go-underco...
mladenkovacevic 12y ago
Oh look NSA had a product launch today. On a serious note I flirted with installing Messenger several times and couldn't go through with it after facing all the app permissions. As a platform I wonder if this will follow the same path as the Facebook Games/Apps platform. Rampant use, rise of at least one game company (Zynga), then gradual but consistent desertion. As a service for businesses, this is interesting and only time will tell how threatening the move is for existing customer support/communications apps. The deciding factor will be how conducive Facebook's network is to customer/brand interaction and if they can be a place for both personal and commercial interactions.
- th0br0 12y ago
  I agree with your stance on Messenger, yet I have found Cyanogen's Privacy Guard more than satisfying to limit Messenger's "spying" powers. Outside of the US(?) I don't think that this has got much chance of taking off. The legal / data privacy ramifications of support knowing a customer's fb profile and all the information contained therein are something I find quite difficult to quantify.
  - sirkneeland 12y ago
    Hi from Cyanogen! Glad you like Privacy Guard!
- Shish2k 12y ago
  As far as I've heard (no numbers) the games platform is still fairly popular - which was a surprise to me because I've not seen any games in my feed for years. Apparently this is because facebook realised how annoying it was for non-gamers to get game spam, so they automatically hide the gaming widgets from people who avoid using them. (It is possible that your view of "gradual but consistent desertion" is accurate, just pointing out that it seemed like that to me too, but things are not always as they seem)
ilolu 12y ago
Now Facebook wants to track other things that were out of their control too. If businesses start using the messenger, then facebook will know about my buying habits and other information too. And how long will it take for Facebook to sell as Ads, the information back to businesses that helped them collect it.
- loceng 12y ago
  How long then for FB to develop apps or acquire apps for the dominant use cases, and then squash out/limit the competing apps that integrated and helped build up the user behaviour to begin with? There's no way FB won't do this, that is part of their behaviour. How could they do this? They could all of a sudden require apps to use their payment, with whatever % taken that they please, and if you don't agree then they boot you and tell all of your users about their replacement app.
colinhowe 12y ago
Disclaimer: I work for a company providing customer service over social media solutions. Allowing businesses to do messaging with customers is a big deal. It's been there on FB messenger for a while, but, it hasn't had the attention. We're seeing an increasing trend of customers wanting to contact businesses where they are rather than being forced to follow the business' requirements. Facebook is one of those places.
- pbreit 12y ago
  It's criminal that you can't text message businesses. That seems to me the most obvious route. Any IP-based phone system should support this. Not sure how it would work with AT&T.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Are you kidding me? I'm only 32, and I'd never consider texting a business. Call? Sure. Email? Sure. But texting? Seriously?
    - personlurking 12y ago
      I had a banking problem a few years ago and stumbled across a Twitter account of a "super rep" for the (major) bank. I tweeted him, he tweeted back in 60 seconds with his email. I emailed him right away and we had quick-fire chat over email and he said "let me fix your problem and I'll email you when it's fixed". About 3 minutes later, he emailed me back. The quickness of it all, plus the short-style emails going back-and-forth, reminded me of SMS and it was wonderful. In fact, I've never had better, nor quicker customer service. If it matters, I'm 33.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        To me the key parts of that interaction are that he was immediately available to you and empowered to fix your problem. If phone support picked up on the first ring and did something more than try to deflect, it would be fine too.
txu 12y ago
I got pretty excited about it, but I really can't trust Facebook as much as before. They practically took "graph" off of "open graph" by disabling third party's ability to list users' friends and invite them. I won't be surprised if later in the year some apps get banned from Facebook APIs because they touched Facebook's pie, which now covers pretty much everything. It's no accident half of the apps in the showcase are for sticker, GIF, and video replies as they pose no threat to core Facebook features. So what's in it for us?
- sgarg26 12y ago
  Apps that have a healthy enough revenue stream such that they share a portion of their revenue with Facebook will probably not have to worry about trusting Facebook.
- sgarg26 12y ago
  I think they will open up their ecosystem to let a apps grow really big organically. Then they will try to figure out a monetization strategy with the largest apps. App makers that do not play ball will probably get cut regardless of how big they are... There are good examples: Consider Zynga vs Lolapps when Facebook originally opened their API.
  - loceng 12y ago
    I posted this above - How long then for FB to develop apps or acquire apps for the dominant use cases, and then squash out/limit the competing apps that integrated and helped build up the user behaviour to begin with? There's no way FB won't do this, that is part of their behaviour. How could they do this? They could all of a sudden require apps to use their payment, with whatever % taken that they please, and if you don't agree then they boot you and tell all of your users about their replacement app.
    - sgarg26 12y ago
      You are right. Probably something like half the time that it took for them to do this before.
weixiyen 12y ago
Is this only media sharing like images, gifs and videos or can I share links and text content too?
mcintyre1994 12y ago
Hopefully they approach this with more tact than they have the news feed. Since I can't be bothered to help their algorithm find the tiny bit of signal left there and it clearly values sponsored crap more than anything I care about the value of it is below zero at this point for me. Messenger on the other hand is my most used mobile messaging service, almost everyone I regularly message is on there. It's useful and I actually care when I see a message - hopefully it'll stay that way.
smrtinsert 12y ago
Thanks to Facebook I uninstalled Facebook and Messenger and now my battery lasts four times as long! Thanks Facebook!
zkhalique 12y ago
What is the goal of all this? Facebook used to be the platform, and apps could go viral there. Then they made it so that you can't even get a list of all friends. Now messenger is the platform instead of the newsfeed? OK, what can I embed in it, and why would I do it? What benefits does our app get from it over SMS invitations?
- sirkneeland 12y ago
  I'm sure Facebook sees value in newsfeed still. They're just not going to put their eggs in one basket. It makes sense to try new things and see what sticks
chatmasta 12y ago
I'm surprised they haven't integrated WhatsApp and messenger into one app (or platform) yet. Why?
- coldcode 12y ago
  Maybe different economic benefits to keeping them different. FB is always about the money.
bluthru 12y ago
Another decade, another company trying to turn the web into AOL.
sushimako 12y ago
The business messenger is the perfect complement to their recently released Anonymous Login and a very smart move. As a business implementing Anonymous Login, you give up having an email address of your user (or any other kind of contact information) for a very simple and attractive login method. Now with the messenger you can actually contact your (anonymous) users, even if all you have is a facebook provisioned ID. All this at the cost of giving facebook complete control over your userbase and your means and rights of getting in contact with them. Brilliant.
joaomsa 12y ago
I'm very interested in the Messenger App platform, integrating rich media into chat is the reason I hacked a client side Messenger chat bot a while ago. https://github.com/joaomsa/botman https://github.com/joaomsa/botman Much faster to transmit intense disapproval or glee as a reaction gif.

111 points by tayeed 12y ago

strzalek 12y ago

messenger.com must've been expensive one to acquire ;)

benaiah 12y ago

I wonder if this is why they shut off their XMPP Messenger integration earlier this spring.

wl 12y ago
It's not gone just yet. It has a few more weeks of life. I saw this headline and thought maybe there'd be a way to continue to use Facebook messenger in Adium. Nope. Only if you're building an "app" for iOS or Android.
- diminoten 12y ago
  Can't someone (either from Adium or from the community) just develop a "Facebook" plugin for Adium using their "new" way of doing things? Sure, you can't use XMPP anymore, but that's okay, right?

Kronopath 12y ago

Before anyone starts thinking this stuff is super-innovative and new, let me tell you what's really going on here: Facebook wants to make Messenger into a platform in the same way the big Asian chat apps are. Things like Weixin/WeChat or LINE. I mean, just look at the most recent additions to Messenger: - Stickers. These grew in popularity starting in Asian apps. [0] - Using Messenger for payments [1] and to send money to each other [2] have been in WeChat since at least last year. - Offering "official accounts" for businesses to "chat" with customers. [3] Yep, that's there too. - And of course, sharing of messages with rich-media content from other apps. [4] To give an example, with WeChat you can pop open QQMusic (a music streaming app) and share a song with your friend that they can play and stream without leaving WeChat. All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was the reason they split Messenger from the main Facebook app in the first place. [0] http://www.wechat.com/en/features.html#emoticons http://www.wechat.com/en/features.html#emoticons [1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-brands-and-retailers/ https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-b... [2] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-between-friends/ https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-bet... [3] http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-business.html http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-busi... [4] http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments

nashadelic 12y ago
Innovative or not, that's not is going to determine the success of this. There has to be the ability to generate mass market adoption with innovation which Facebook is really good at.
- ehhuang 12y ago
  just like it did with the poke app.
- mandeepj 12y ago
  The last success Facebook had seen was with their flagship product - Facebook website, rest they bought it (whatsapp, instagram). You know how it went with apps from facebook labs. I hope you remember how big of a disaster was Facebook phone. Although, I laud their efforts of keep trying and trying.
  - GCA10 12y ago
    Ah, the voice of an older brother, taking time to criticize the little ones while urging them to try harder. I can't explain why, but your commentary makes me smile. Keep it coming!
canistr 12y ago
I don't think it's an either/or scenario for Facebook. Ultimately such experiences benefit the user regardless of where/when the initial innovation occurred. We've seen it over and over again. You don't need to be first or even last to the game. You just need to be the best at implementing it and your users will follow.
sahara 12y ago
>All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare. There's likely a third aspect: Fb (& Snapchat, et al) framing/reframing their services to be more familiar/comfortable for East Asian users as the business case makes competing in those markets increasingly appealing/unavoidable. As others have noted, the truth is probably some combination of all of the above (and then some). I doubt anyone has any idea how these concepts will play outside Asia. Snapchat has been crowing for some time now about their intentions to become Tencent West, but their success to date hinges entirely on the core offering. Is anyone—aside from strippers[0]—using Snapcash, for instance? There's definitely something fascinating about this sort of nested bundling (social recommendations within a ridesharing service within a maps app, etc.) but I don't know if there are strong indications that American/Western users want that. It seems to me that the logic is "500 million Chinese can't be wrong!"—maybe? But the West hasn't even seen one messaging platform to rule them all since AIM, lately there have been far more web/mobile unbundling success stories, and I'm not sure what would turn that tide. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/style/strippers-go-undercover-on-snapchat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/style/strippers-go-underco...

mladenkovacevic 12y ago

Oh look NSA had a product launch today. On a serious note I flirted with installing Messenger several times and couldn't go through with it after facing all the app permissions. As a platform I wonder if this will follow the same path as the Facebook Games/Apps platform. Rampant use, rise of at least one game company (Zynga), then gradual but consistent desertion. As a service for businesses, this is interesting and only time will tell how threatening the move is for existing customer support/communications apps. The deciding factor will be how conducive Facebook's network is to customer/brand interaction and if they can be a place for both personal and commercial interactions.

th0br0 12y ago
I agree with your stance on Messenger, yet I have found Cyanogen's Privacy Guard more than satisfying to limit Messenger's "spying" powers. Outside of the US(?) I don't think that this has got much chance of taking off. The legal / data privacy ramifications of support knowing a customer's fb profile and all the information contained therein are something I find quite difficult to quantify.
- sirkneeland 12y ago
  Hi from Cyanogen! Glad you like Privacy Guard!
Shish2k 12y ago
As far as I've heard (no numbers) the games platform is still fairly popular - which was a surprise to me because I've not seen any games in my feed for years. Apparently this is because facebook realised how annoying it was for non-gamers to get game spam, so they automatically hide the gaming widgets from people who avoid using them. (It is possible that your view of "gradual but consistent desertion" is accurate, just pointing out that it seemed like that to me too, but things are not always as they seem)

ilolu 12y ago

Now Facebook wants to track other things that were out of their control too. If businesses start using the messenger, then facebook will know about my buying habits and other information too. And how long will it take for Facebook to sell as Ads, the information back to businesses that helped them collect it.

loceng 12y ago
How long then for FB to develop apps or acquire apps for the dominant use cases, and then squash out/limit the competing apps that integrated and helped build up the user behaviour to begin with? There's no way FB won't do this, that is part of their behaviour. How could they do this? They could all of a sudden require apps to use their payment, with whatever % taken that they please, and if you don't agree then they boot you and tell all of your users about their replacement app.

colinhowe 12y ago

Disclaimer: I work for a company providing customer service over social media solutions. Allowing businesses to do messaging with customers is a big deal. It's been there on FB messenger for a while, but, it hasn't had the attention. We're seeing an increasing trend of customers wanting to contact businesses where they are rather than being forced to follow the business' requirements. Facebook is one of those places.

pbreit 12y ago
It's criminal that you can't text message businesses. That seems to me the most obvious route. Any IP-based phone system should support this. Not sure how it would work with AT&T.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Are you kidding me? I'm only 32, and I'd never consider texting a business. Call? Sure. Email? Sure. But texting? Seriously?
  - personlurking 12y ago
    I had a banking problem a few years ago and stumbled across a Twitter account of a "super rep" for the (major) bank. I tweeted him, he tweeted back in 60 seconds with his email. I emailed him right away and we had quick-fire chat over email and he said "let me fix your problem and I'll email you when it's fixed". About 3 minutes later, he emailed me back. The quickness of it all, plus the short-style emails going back-and-forth, reminded me of SMS and it was wonderful. In fact, I've never had better, nor quicker customer service. If it matters, I'm 33.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      To me the key parts of that interaction are that he was immediately available to you and empowered to fix your problem. If phone support picked up on the first ring and did something more than try to deflect, it would be fine too.

txu 12y ago

I got pretty excited about it, but I really can't trust Facebook as much as before. They practically took "graph" off of "open graph" by disabling third party's ability to list users' friends and invite them. I won't be surprised if later in the year some apps get banned from Facebook APIs because they touched Facebook's pie, which now covers pretty much everything. It's no accident half of the apps in the showcase are for sticker, GIF, and video replies as they pose no threat to core Facebook features. So what's in it for us?

sgarg26 12y ago
Apps that have a healthy enough revenue stream such that they share a portion of their revenue with Facebook will probably not have to worry about trusting Facebook.
sgarg26 12y ago
I think they will open up their ecosystem to let a apps grow really big organically. Then they will try to figure out a monetization strategy with the largest apps. App makers that do not play ball will probably get cut regardless of how big they are... There are good examples: Consider Zynga vs Lolapps when Facebook originally opened their API.
- loceng 12y ago
  I posted this above - How long then for FB to develop apps or acquire apps for the dominant use cases, and then squash out/limit the competing apps that integrated and helped build up the user behaviour to begin with? There's no way FB won't do this, that is part of their behaviour. How could they do this? They could all of a sudden require apps to use their payment, with whatever % taken that they please, and if you don't agree then they boot you and tell all of your users about their replacement app.
  - sgarg26 12y ago
    You are right. Probably something like half the time that it took for them to do this before.

weixiyen 12y ago

Is this only media sharing like images, gifs and videos or can I share links and text content too?

mcintyre1994 12y ago

Hopefully they approach this with more tact than they have the news feed. Since I can't be bothered to help their algorithm find the tiny bit of signal left there and it clearly values sponsored crap more than anything I care about the value of it is below zero at this point for me. Messenger on the other hand is my most used mobile messaging service, almost everyone I regularly message is on there. It's useful and I actually care when I see a message - hopefully it'll stay that way.

smrtinsert 12y ago

Thanks to Facebook I uninstalled Facebook and Messenger and now my battery lasts four times as long! Thanks Facebook!

zkhalique 12y ago

What is the goal of all this? Facebook used to be the platform, and apps could go viral there. Then they made it so that you can't even get a list of all friends. Now messenger is the platform instead of the newsfeed? OK, what can I embed in it, and why would I do it? What benefits does our app get from it over SMS invitations?

sirkneeland 12y ago
I'm sure Facebook sees value in newsfeed still. They're just not going to put their eggs in one basket. It makes sense to try new things and see what sticks

chatmasta 12y ago

I'm surprised they haven't integrated WhatsApp and messenger into one app (or platform) yet. Why?

coldcode 12y ago
Maybe different economic benefits to keeping them different. FB is always about the money.

bluthru 12y ago

Another decade, another company trying to turn the web into AOL.

sushimako 12y ago

The business messenger is the perfect complement to their recently released Anonymous Login and a very smart move. As a business implementing Anonymous Login, you give up having an email address of your user (or any other kind of contact information) for a very simple and attractive login method. Now with the messenger you can actually contact your (anonymous) users, even if all you have is a facebook provisioned ID. All this at the cost of giving facebook complete control over your userbase and your means and rights of getting in contact with them. Brilliant.

joaomsa 12y ago

I'm very interested in the Messenger App platform, integrating rich media into chat is the reason I hacked a client side Messenger chat bot a while ago. https://github.com/joaomsa/botman https://github.com/joaomsa/botman Much faster to transmit intense disapproval or glee as a reaction gif.