What purpose would an optimized, limited-scope chatbot for Facebook even look like? Though come to think of it, I can think of a few usecases if Facebook wasn't out to dominate everything about real life. For example:
- When traveling to a new city: "Do I know anyone who lives here or is currently visiting?"
- When wanting to read about or discuss news topics, but only from my current network: "Are any of my friends talking about the election?"
- When bored: "What games are my friends playing?" (I'm thinking back to the time when FB was a games platform for things like Words with Friends)
All of these may be findable through a combination of searches, but I'm not a power user, and I bet most people aren't. I think if I go to the "New York, NY" location page, there's a section that lists friend connections, but a bot that processed a natural language query would be so much smoother.
And what about queries like: "What are my friends doing this weekend?". Searching that exact question brings up nothing of relevance. When I do a search for "weekend", the top results are for things like "Vampire Weekend". I have to scroll down to find a section for "Posts from Friends", and that only contains posts (even from months ago) that contain the literal word, "weekend".
I don't really know how to improve those results, without hurting some other kind of expected functionality. But a chatbot that purports to deal with everyday human questions might be the right interface for everyday quality-of-life questions