The main highlight of the week: Facebook plans to put ads In Messenger. They are also providing a short link, such as http://fb.com/msg/techcrunch, that creates a Messenger conversation with a FB page. This is huge, and I would bet that they plan to let advertisers create ads that lead straight to a conversation in Messenger, instead of linking to the advertiser’s website or app.
One-to-one conversations are perfect for advertisers and businesses. Today, Messenger conversation notifications have a very high open rate. How would that change if certain percentage of those messages are ads?
The founder of Growbot, an employee engagement Slack bot, shares tips about how a bot should behave and interact with its users. A must read for anyone building a Slack bot.
Thoughts about where conversational interfaces make sense. It introduces Context as the key of a conversational interface vs an app, and the beauty of transparent updates from the backend vs app updates.
Questions yet to be answered around the current hype around chat bots. I’ll highlight this quote: “Starting is easy, persevering is harder, so again we are going to see a peak followed by a crash”.
Assist, which was featured in Techcrunch a month ago, raised $5.5M. It lets you access Uber, Seamless, OpenTable from the main messaging platforms. The integration with those services today is pretty simple: asks you few questions and gives you a url with the given input parameters. Money is in the air.
Solid already had big clients with their solution to keep track of meeting notes, and they just released their Slack bot. Lots of bots for meetings and scrum standups have been launched recently.
If you use Mention to get notifications when someone talks about your brand, you are going to love this bot. For a simpler version or Mention, have a look at Notify. I use it to know when people talk about our Android apps.
