The Guardian says that the move is “as much about making money as being social”, and that if businesses use Facebook to sell more, in turn Facebook can make more money from them.
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“Now with Messenger, Facebook is inviting companies to engage their customers in new ways on its platform at scale”, said Alex Dayon, president and chief product officer at Salesforce.
Facebook launched chatbots on Tuesday with a handful of partners, including Shopify, an ecommerce site, and cable TV news network CNN.
Facebook has been steadily adding features to Messenger since it was spun off as a separate app in 2014.
In a second demonstration, Marcus showed how a bot-enabled app called Poncho features a cat persona with a “dry and witty sense of humor” to provide weather forecasts and information in a really fun way.
Inc. has teamed with Facebook to allow customers to order floral and food gifts through the Facebook Messenger chat service. Facebook’s aim is to create one-on-one conversations between their users and companies, to expand it’s reach in customer service.
Gone are the days when F8 was just for announcing newsfeed redesigns – in the opening keynote speeches, we’ve heard about a brand new Messenger chatbot platform, a solar-powered WiFi plane, and all kinds of live video innovations.
“That’s why I think the work we’re all doing together is more important now than it’s ever been before”, Zuckerberg said.
“We are excited to team with Facebook to offer bots for Messenger, ultimately taking our customer experience to a new level”, he said. But vice president David Marcus said the company wants to be careful not to annoy users by filling the Messenger app with spam. They will have to be submitted to Facebook and reviewed for approval. Individuals on Messenger will be able to block future messages from a business at any time.
For one, Facebook commands a vast trove of data on the estimated 1.6 billion people who use the main service and the 900 million who use Messenger.
“More and more of our mobile time is spent within messaging, ” said Ken Sena, an investment analyst at Evercore ISI, who examined the apps in a recent report.
Users can control the communication that they receive. While being new to the USA social media’s messaging app, chatbots have already been incorporated in some Asian popular messaging services, such as China’s Wechat.
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Facebook chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg discusses Messenger and other platforms at the leading social network’s annual developers conference in San Francisco on April 12, 2016. It does, however, want to help you make great 360-degree videos – if you have ,000 to spare.
