Some thoughts on bots and news
Yesterday Facebook announced Messenger Platform Beta, which allows Facebook pages to have automated conversations with Facebook users via Messenger. This is big because it allows businesses to reach 900 million people in a relatively nascent interaction model.
This is especially big for the news industry. Three years ago, social dethroned search as the strongest traffic driver to news websites, including Mic’s. More recently, users around the globe have voted with their thumbs that chats are preferable to social feeds. Chat apps like Messenger are well-positioned to surpass social media as the primary source of news discovery soon. News is already omnipresent in chat apps in the form of shared links; the question isn’t whether there will be a great news chat bot, but what it will look like, and who will make it.
Quick side note: I was surprised to see Facebook embrace the term “bot.” The word has a pejorative connotation, as in “spam bot” or “botnet.” It’s also diminutive. “Bots” do not sound important enough to bet the future of the world’s fastest growing app on. But with this big endorsement from Facebook and the rush of development happening on Messenger already, we may soon see these connotations erased.
Why news makes sense in chat
For Facebook, publishers are some of the easiest first use-cases to see on Messenger. In Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote yesterday, CNN’s daily news briefing was one of two Messenger demos. And this makes sense. Publishers are businesses who often have large Facebook followings. Many publishers have teams dedicated to packaging stories for Facebook users specifically.
And compared to the other industries vying for Messenger users, news is already native to messaging. People message links to each other all day. On our site, messaging share buttons (specifically SMS and Whatsapp) perform better than Twitter and email. Other publishers have found this to be true as well. The natural ubiquity of news within messaging apps will allow news publishers’ integrations into Messenger to be much more graceful than, say, Geico’s, because users are already comfortable interacting with news content in chat.
Push notifications
So far, most news bots have simply been vehicles for push notifications. The reasoning behind this goes something like: “Push notifications are really good at re-engaging the users of our app, so why not treat messages on chat apps like push notifications?”
The analogy is true in the sense that a message and a push notification are often of similar length. But the problem is that push notifications barely scratch the surface of messaging apps’ feature set. Push notifications are one-sided conversations by definition. The power of chat is the ability to take user input and tailor your service in response, which is hugely valuable.
What news will look like in chat
As David Marcus said in his keynote yesterday, the idea of chat as a “command line interface” isn’t quite right. Users don’t want to have to learn a new programming language to hail a cab. Instead, messages from third-parties should support interaction natively. Facebook’s structured messages allow quick response via calls to action, similar to Kik’s suggested responses:
In addition, Messenger supports a multi-card message they’re calling H-Scroll, which allows you to swipe through several structured messages in a row. For our interview with Vice President Joe Biden this week, we repackaged the interview into a linear H-Scroll story:
There is also certainly room for storytelling in message installments, something Anthony Sessa has some big ideas about.
What’s next
To succeed in a messaging app, a business will need to send messages that are as relevant as the information users are already receiving in that app, which typically comes from friends and family. This information is inherently interesting because (a) you care about what your friends and family care about, and (b) their messages are personalized to you, because they know what you like better than anyone else. For a business to match friends-and-family level of personalization will take some pretty serious AI. Fortunately, Facebook has made an API engine available to Messenger developers. It will be really exciting to see what people do with it.
Looking forward, we won’t see an explosion of bots on the platform very soon, because Facebook has instituted a strict, slow review process for new bots. They appear to have learned from their launch of their initial app platform, which was open to the point of chaos. But in the coming months we should see some really interesting applications emerge. The question for us is what the best chat-native news-delivery mechanisms are going to look like. My guess is that at first they will look like toys.
