Introducing Messenger Platform and Businesses on Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Messenger Platform and Businesses on Messenger

developers.facebook.com

111 pointstayeed58 comments

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

[1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-b...

[2] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-bet...

[3] http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-busi...

[4] http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments

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.

just like it did with the poke app.

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.

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!

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.

>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-underco...

Absolutely agreed on your third aspect. Facebook is a global business, after all.

Messaging apps are all about social connections. Any kind of monetization has to build upon that.

Even if FB/Snapchat tries to make themselves more agreeable towards Asian markets, they still need to face the question from customer like this: if I have something (Line/Wechat/Kaokao Talk) that works great for me and my friends, what is the reason for me to use their western counterparts (FB/Snapchat)? Only because they are trying to make themselves similar to the local competitors ? That is not convincing enough.

Stickers have been around since Yahoo Instant Messenger in the early 2000s.

Official Accounts have also been in various IM programs. Meebo had a nifty implementation of this, but it has been done before.

Payments might be original, not sure. It is at least new to the US market.

Media Rich Sharing is also old hat, I recall YIM also having this to some extent. In the very least, they had games you could play with friends.

(Surprisingly enough, it appears ICQ never made a push into payments, which is odd since ICQ pretty much invented everything else about IM!)

While I agree that all of these ideas have been thought of prior to the Asian chat apps, it's largely the similarity in execution that FB Messenger is taking compared to WeChat/ Line/KakaoTalk that the parent is talking about.

One important thing that the Asian messengers have executed better than the others is monetization of IM, something which has eluded Western messengers for a long time. To this day, FB still doesn't charge $$ for its stickers. Meanwhile, Line reported earnings of $600M+ and WeChat $900M+ from stickers/games/ads last year [1]. I think that's what has FB's attention.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/technology/personaltech/me...

Disclaimer: Former Meebo engineer

Nothing says better instant messaging execution than monetization of colored pixels.

Yahoo tried monetization for their desktop products (IIRC they had some sort of animated stickers that cost money) but the payment story just wasn't there back then.

YIM really did try to monetize, they just failed.

I also remember MSN messenger trying to monetize VOIP ala Skype but failing. NAT has just been introduced and traversal techniques where half baked, so getting VOIP to work at all was mostly failure. Indeed the primary reason I used YIM was because its voice chat worked.

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a good history of what the various IM platforms offered over time, so finding references is hard. :(

BTW: Meebo rocked! I am still annoyed that I have no proper multi-protocol IM program. I've lost contact with people I had been in touch with for over a decade. :( Meebo was the first time I realized that Web Apps could be a Good Thing.

Unfortunately with Meebo's closure I also learned the down side of Web Apps.

Y! Messenger monetized branded themes. National advertisers would pay for the experiences, users got to pick from branded backgrounds and emoticons. Chris Szeto, then Y! Messenger head, pioneered this revenue model. It was quite lucrative but then WebIM became a thing (a la Meebo) and the market shifted away from Desktop downloads. FF a few more years and we see Mobile eat WebIMs lunch. The cycle continues...

Thanks for the kind words about Meebo! I miss it a lot as well, particularly the people. P)

Thank you for better knowing history! :)

Here just to say I am also a former meebo user who liked the experience. I used it till it was no more. That time was a sort of golden age for text chat. We could have all services unified and easy to use from one single place. Now it is all messed up.

Line reported earnings of $600M+ and WeChat $900M+ from stickers/games/ads last year

And yet people still think $19B for WhatsApp was ridiculously overpriced. WhatsApp had roughly double the number of monthly active users compared to WeChat back when they last released comparable numbers[1].

[1] "WhatsApp has 430 million MAUs [in Q3 2013], while WeChat had 272 million active users" https://www.techinasia.com/messaging-apps-should-reveal-mont...

Fast Company posted an excellent, in-depth piece on Line a month ago, and that's what immediately came to mind in light of this announcement: "How Japan's Line App Became A Culture-Changing, Revenue-Generating Phenomenon" http://www.fastcompany.com/3041578/most-innovative-companies...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074132

> 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.

It was. Your entire post hit the nail on the head btw.

Good. I've been waiting for a non-SMS and non-iMessage way of communicating. Americans shouldn't be tied to cell phone plans or the Apple vertical monopoly in order to communicate.

In Japan, for example, we are starting to see individuals not even purchase a smartphone but just an ipad, ipod, or some sort of wireless device along with a portable wifi hotspot. This enables them to use whatever device they want to communicate. It is certainly far from ubiquitous but the fact that it is possible to get by on a data plan is exactly how the wireless net should work.

Now a facebook, LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber regional monopoly isn't the ideal end-game either. But it looks like it will take that first step before some sort of standard beyond plain SMS emerges.

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.

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.

Hi from Cyanogen! Glad you like Privacy Guard!

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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

You are right. Probably something like half the time that it took for them to do this before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you kidding me? I'm only 32, and I'd never consider texting a business. Call? Sure. Email? Sure. But texting? Seriously?

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.

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.

Right! Is SMS communications with a business useful if its going into the same workflow as call center phone calls?

People aren't wanting for new communications methods. They want what they've always wanted: quick, useful support from someone empowered to provide that.

I avoid making phone calls as much as possible. I think that's a growing trend.

If I can interact with a business solely through textual communication I will do so, even if it's significantly slower.

Pretty much the entire world's preferred communication method is text messaging so I think I'm on sturdy ground here.

The company I'm building right now has something similar to this as a major component of the service (feedback via text [SMS->email for the moment, but I'm also going to have it be visible in a web dashboard] ] is one of two methods I'm going to launch with.) I'm billing it as a "universal customer testimonial" service with a some added benefits. One of those benefits works like this: a business receives a message sent in via text. In order for the message to be posted publicly, the business has to approve it, but even if the business chooses not to post a message, they can read it and act on it (I include a message with each approval request that says 'If you do not wish to approve this testimonial, you may ignore this message. However, we do recommend taking even negative feedback into consideration in order to improve the product or service you provide.') So they get customer feedback, and can then choose to turn that into a public testimonial, or they can not post it publicly but still act on it.

Another benefit is a 'remind to review elsewhere' message. If the business approves the message, we send a reminder to review the business or product on a service of the business' choice (like Yelp, Amazon, etc.)

I'm hoping that the extremely low barrier to use (sending a text), will mean that these businesses get more feedback (since there are plenty of people who don't want to post on services they have to register for; don't feel like downloading an app; who wouldn't mind giving some feedback, but don't want to feel the pressure of 'crafting' a reply the way you often do on some services; who, even if they are registered, may just put it off forever because it seems like too much work, etc.) and so will have more information with which to improve their businesses. The idea is based on the 'praise publicly, criticize privately' maxim.

I worked on creating a similar service for a few months in regards to helping businesses (SaaS companies specifically) capture testimonials. I ultimately decided not to pursue the idea after having conversations with potential customers. SMS was not going to be a feature in the initial version and we may have been targeting different niches but I would definitely recommend getting it in front of your target audience as soon as possible or just talk to them about it.

I found that most SaaS companies wanted a few really well written and well placed testimonials rather than a constant stream of subpar testimonials and didn't really need a system for that.

It sounds like you may be going more towards local small businesses though and maybe they have a need for it. Happy to discuss any questions further with you if you'd like.

My starting market is definitely local businesses, though I do think there might be hope for online companies too (one idea for subsequent versions would be to have the ability to turn Twitter/FB/forum posts and linkable web comments into testimonials with just a couple of steps, rather than going through the whole copy post->go to your CMS->reformat it stuff. There will also be an embeddable testimonial board.)

I'm pretty far along with the initial version to demo it to them, so I should have it front of them fairly soon. Dealing with sub-par testimonials is something I thought about early - that's part of the reason everything requires approval by default. I'm hoping these businesses will post the great ones, appreciate, but maybe not post the so-so ones, and take seriously and act on the negative ones.

Ultimately, I'd like it to cohere from three things: a central place to aggregate reviews/testimonials from many sources, a customer feedback system, and a "reminder to review elsewhere" (to nudge the marginal reviewer to actually leave that Yelp review) service rather than just a feedback system like TalkBin or Talk To the Manager.

Seems like room for a text->Messenger gateway, or other ways of integrating SMS into a business's existing customer feedback channels. (Which probably exists in various forms of hacked-together-API-mashups already, since it's hard on a customer service team to manage a bunch of different inboxen.)

TalkBin (YC W11) was a platform for allowing customers to SMS local businesses, but getting brick and mortar businesses to adopt a new communication channel isn't easy.

Had a conversation with a local restaurant over Yik Yak the other day. A couple members of the staff were participating in the discussion thread.

A few other local people in the area commented too.

It was very fascinating. I wonder if Facebook is taking a hard look at Yik Yak regarding this, because I could never imagine otherwise communicating with a business (especially using my actual Facebook identity, with my name and profile picture).

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Much faster to transmit intense disapproval or glee as a reaction gif.

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

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?

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

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

Maybe different economic benefits to keeping them different. FB is always about the money.

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

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