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Facebook Messenger Platform

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Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#41

Post by Johnie »

hayksaakian wrote: post #8
aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

Facebook disregards your rights as a creator, user, and individual. I've read enough history to know what sharecropping looks like. Tell me how this is different than sharecropping. Why should I build something I don't control on Lord Zuckerberg's platform so I can play the startup lottery? We did this almost a decade ago. Facebook introduced their developer platform and people started giving up their freedoms. This…

The real question is can you get in, win, and get out before any of that matters. If you 'rode the facebook apps' wave you probably made decent money unless you stayed in too long. Another strategy is to build an integration to messenger to get exposure for your totally independant app. For example If i made some pizza ordering ai, i could hook it up to messenger as an additional channel.

If you look at some of the successful startups that started on a platform, this is what they did.

Example: Instagram - used Facebook for viral distribution and eventually eclipsed Facebook Imgur - built image hosting for Reddit and now has eclipsed Reddit.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#42

Post by smacktoward »

pbreit wrote: post #23

I like bots and everything but I wonder if chat's popularity stems from there being a human at the other end?

I don't think so. 15 years ago I created a service to let people access data from my company's intranet via AOL Instant Messenger (which everyone was already using for internal chat). It was still a big hit. People loved the convenience of just being able to ping a bot and immediately get back Client X's phone number, instead of having to wade through umpty-ump levels of menus and web pages to get the same info.

The interface to that service was extremely crude by today's standards (basically a set of magic keywords that comprised a simple query language), but people liked the convenience so much they were more than willing how to talk to the bot in its own lingo. I can only imagine how much more popular it would have been if it had a real, natural-language chat interface.

As long as it's easy and convenient, and comes back with the right answers (a big if, that last one), nobody will care if there's a human on the other end or not.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#43

Post by lowglow »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

Facebook disregards your rights as a creator, user, and individual. I've read enough history to know what sharecropping looks like. Tell me how this is different than sharecropping. Why should I build something I don't control on Lord Zuckerberg's platform so I can play the startup lottery? We did this almost a decade ago. Facebook introduced their developer platform and people started giving up their freedoms. This…

Yes. This. Facebook has been known to bait and switch on developers time and time again, even outright stealing what devs have worked on if it becomes competitive.

If you build on platforms like this, you're going to have a bad time.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#44

Post by [deleted] »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

Facebook disregards your rights as a creator, user, and individual. I've read enough history to know what sharecropping looks like. Tell me how this is different than sharecropping. Why should I build something I don't control on Lord Zuckerberg's platform so I can play the startup lottery? We did this almost a decade ago. Facebook introduced their developer platform and people started giving up their freedoms. This…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#45

Post by lowglow »

vr3690 wrote: post #28

I don't get the hype behind bots? When are where was it proved that bots as interfaces can be successful?

I think people are conflating bots with something intelligent, some people go so far as to say AI bots, which is very misleading. There's a lot of hype around autonomous agents, with not a lot of understanding.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#46

Post by jaxondu »

pbreit wrote: post #23

I like bots and everything but I wonder if chat's popularity stems from there being a human at the other end?

The current bots trends started when silicon valley saw how successful WeChat is building a platform on top of its chat app. It has an eco that is not tied to AppStore/PlayStore. What WeChat is doing is more of building apps rather than bots on top of WeChat. They took the idea of SMS apps (e.g. SMS to vote for American Idol, SMS to top up your mobile data plan) and model it for chat. So one can basically build an Uber app inside WeChat, and that's what Uber's China competitor DiDi is doing. WeChat users in China can do all their Didi, shopping, order food, buy cinema tickets, book train tickets, payment, online banking all within WeChat app. Fast forward few years to 2015, and Slack bots become a thing. So interactive apps via text commands become bots as it gains more intelligence (or not like the case of Tay by Microsoft). Facebook is doing catch up and apparently it is different from WeChat. One crucial thing that made WeChat so successful is payment, and that enables commerce via the platform. There is no such option in Messenger. Maybe not ready or Facebook has a different direction for its bots platform.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#47

Post by djsumdog »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

Facebook disregards your rights as a creator, user, and individual. I've read enough history to know what sharecropping looks like. Tell me how this is different than sharecropping. Why should I build something I don't control on Lord Zuckerberg's platform so I can play the startup lottery? We did this almost a decade ago. Facebook introduced their developer platform and people started giving up their freedoms. This…

I wish I could get my friends to use DuckDuckGo's XMPP server. Google removed federation from their server.

AIM, Yahoo and MSN were all closed gardens and people reverse engineered them to make gaim (now pidgin/libpurple), audium (libpurple based?), trillian, et al.

There is a Facebook plug-in for libpurple. I've looked at the source code for it and hangups (OSS hangouts library) but I'm already short on time for all the projects I want to work on.

In any case, in the past, devs in the community used these closed walled servers for our use. Today the very nature of IM is different with its use dictated to us by Google/Facebook's marketing gods (no online indicators, you're always online, you're never away, everything is a text, e-mails are apparently too long and difficult to read).

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#49

Post by ascendantlogic »

The Twitter debacle is what really did it for me. As others have pointed out this is sharecropping through and through. You build anything meaningful on this and Facebook has you by the you-know-whats and can pull the rug out from under you at will. Thanks but no thanks.

Re: Facebook Messenger Platform

#50

Post by yeukhon »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

Facebook disregards your rights as a creator, user, and individual. I've read enough history to know what sharecropping looks like. Tell me how this is different than sharecropping. Why should I build something I don't control on Lord Zuckerberg's platform so I can play the startup lottery? We did this almost a decade ago. Facebook introduced their developer platform and people started giving up their freedoms. This…

Then don't build on it. Period. If you don't like what Facebook is doing, don't build on it. Don't use it. People who built on others' platform shouldn't expect utopia. You don't own the house, you are just a tenant. Contract is done you are out. Well, there isn't much of any contract between you and Facebook Platform anyway.
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