I'm crying. Remember when messaging was built on open platforms and standards like XMPP and IRC? The golden year(s?) when Google Talk worked with AIM and anyone could choose whatever client they preferred?
Welcome to the future friends when we must pay to battle the keymasters and gatekeepers on their terms to do what we used to do ourselves, for free.
First they took my RSS, then they took my XMPP... Who can guess whats next?
We can take back the internet. We've been at a disadvantage for so long because centralized services are easier to build great experiences with than federated services. Messaging protocols require identities, and federated identities are user-hostile. They worked once: email. Never again.
Luckily, we're in the middle of a decentralization renaissance. Instead of managing your identity on a server controlled by Facebook or your XMPP host, you can manage your identity on a blockchain controlled by no one. We can build identities that any app can use. When it comes to network effects, federation loses to centralization, but centralization loses to decentralization.
Pick up the tools—Ethereum and IPFS—and start building systems without gatekeepers. We will win.
You're right about UX being central to the problem, but you're missing a major part of it here.
UX is hard. Getting great user experience takes IMHO a lot more pain than getting algorithms and systems to work right (in most cases). UX is about endless revisions, a lot of boring and often ugly code, obsessing about pixels and quirky details of your UI's "story," and other things that are very time consuming, not fun, and that the vast majority of programmers hate doing.
As a result, people generally have to be paid to work on UX.
This is doubly true because most nerds don't need great UX. They know how things work and can use "raw" hacker projects from the command line. So there's really no motive in most cases. "Works for me."
Until and unless there is an economic model for a less centralized less winner-take-all Internet economy, vertically integrated closed silos will continue to dominate if for no other reason than the fact that they can pay people to do the boring tedious work that separates a nerd project from an app non-nerds want to use.
Edit: It's really always been about UX to some extent. Personal computing won back in the 70s and 80s because it offered far superior user experience to closed silo mainframes. But the Internet and especially mobile have changed the game pretty dramatically. Now closed silos are winning because they offer superior user experience.
But isn't that exactly where countless free and paid clients/apps of varying quality for the user to choose from would come in handy? Take RSS as an example - the technology as open for everyone, but as a profit-seeking company you can still seduce with high-quality, polished client / feed reader. Of course, that option would be open to any number of freelancers, one-man-operations and other indie developers, not just the Googles and Facebooks of this world. A great thing for the enduser, not necessarily a desirable outcome for the mentioned companies.
This is pretty much why the very common failure state of these open technologies is that some company gets very close to perfecting the UX, pulls in a vast majority of the possible users in that space, then slowly abandons the open technology for closed replacements, thus locking in those users that thought they were buying into the open system. (Google Reader, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, ...)
Agreed! Economic models for funding decentralized apps are the key barrier to liberating our network effects from the companies who have fenced them off. I spend my days trying to solve that problem. I'll post on /r/Ethereum soon when there's something people can use.
IMHO this is The Problem, and is far more significant than the problems IPFS or even cryptocurrencies are trying to solve. I would stop short of calling these projects wasted effort, but solving the economic model is a prerequisite to any chance of success for the entire endeavor.
It's not entirely a technical problem. At some point I think a few sacred ideas will need to be questioned, such as the idea that open source must also be "free as in beer."
If there is no economic model, nothing is going to happen. Closed silos will continue to dominate in all the areas that cost money, and among those UX is probably the most significant differentiator that will guarantee their dominance. I love open source gift culture but there are some pretty severe limits to what can practically be accomplished without some source of capital or subsidy.
General purpose blockchains are social clay: you can model any economic interaction on them, then people can engage in that interaction without any company's assistance or permission. I think I have a model that incentivizes crowds to direct their efforts and funds like a non-profit.
It might not work, but if it does, no one can stop those crowds. If I find a new shiny object to chase, the software will keep running as long as people want to use it. We can reshape our world with software that can't be stopped.
We've strayed too far off topic, but you and any readers should feel free to email me anytime. It's in the profile.
The current market cap for all cryptocurrencies is less than $8B, which means that about 75% of all cryptocurrency would have to be focused on the sort of thing you describe to have a chance of competing with Facebook's $5.8B 2015 revenue.
This comparison doesn't make any sense to me. Why should comparing the yearly revenue of a company to the market cap of cryptocurrencies tell us anything at all? They're not even measuring the same type of thing.
I believe sandstorm.io has bigger chances to create a federation renaissance. It makes hosting your own cloud easy. It is also more efficient than p2p technology.
And XMPP has consistently been behind on innovation. I used IRC and Jabber for a really long time. I don't know how long I was waiting for basic audio and video chat in XMPP, which is now a standard thing in almost all proprietary communication systems. People have been wanting those features for a very long time and they migrated away from the open systems because they were consistently behind on features.
I don't understand why open seems to immediately mean better and proprietary is bad. I'm all for an open system if the benefit is clear, but it often makes no difference and ultimately comes down to how the project/software is managed. There are a lot of "open" software products that are controlled by a few and thus, not very open.
I don't think what you write makes sense really. Sure, XMPP has been behind on innovation. Companies using it had four choices: wait for X, implement solution in XMPP and publish it, implement solution in XMPP silently, reimplement everything including X.
Well, we ended up with tens of platforms with X, so obviously companies went with one of the latter two solutions. We know a few of the companies did continue with XMPP and modified ejabberd, so they definitely did XMPP implementation of video for example. Yet, they decided not to publish anything, so globally we're stuck in the same place again.
Similar thing happened to HTML with ages of stagnation. Now we finally standardise what's implemented instead of implementing what's standardised. I don't see how XMPP itself is an issue. Don't like that they're slow? Use your own extension and publish it. Either everyone will use the same solution, or you'll learn why it sucks.
Never mind audio/video, the group chat UX for Jabber still sucks, as does the experience when logging in from multiple devices (something you'd think tech people would have caught onto early).
This is one reason why I have been resisting signing up on various mobile chat apps like whatsapp. My family and friends use it and they get shocked when I keep refusing to sign up on these things.
I do feel excluded from various online chats but for anything important, they text, call, or email me. So perhaps it is not too bad. I end up saving time by avoid gossip and funny videos.
Exactly, I am not using Whatsapp, I used to use it one year back but then again not much important stuff happened on Whatsapp, it was the same story everywhere, people ignored me outright, only called me when they needed help and never otherwise.
It is a relief not looking at the phone every minute of the day despite the fact that nothing important is going to be communicated via whatsapp, or nothing of that significance to me, everything that I really really need to know comes to me via call
I think what’s needed is an open chat protocol that also works well in mobile settings, since that’s where a huge chunk of the potential user base is these days.
Telegram's protocol is built with mobile in mind: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto - I believe their implementation of server-side is closed-source, but remember seeing an open-source version somewhere on GitHub...?
I don't think this is enough, because it assumes that all clients are connected to the same server. What we need is something federated (like XMPP) and with a design that is reasonable for mobile.
No, I’m afraid they wouldn’t. That’s also a big part of the problem. What’s the incentive for a large player like FB to use an open chat protocol? Not much, it seems :-/
When you're small, you have no users, and need to start gathering network effects. So you champion and implement protocols that allow you to interoperate with other networks. You start to eat other companies lunches as you provide a better product.
As you get larger, that same interoperability starts to become a liability as other networks start eating in to your userbase. So you cut out interoperability and start building a walled garden.
That's one thing that I worry about, though. The superior product experience is coming from new centralized services such as Slack and Discord. It's not coming from those building something decentralized.
The timing of this post feels so weird. Yesterday I was running a script that purged my facebook activity completely, and I was in the middle of setting up an xmpp messenger on my tablet just so I can communicate with people using that platform. Then I've noticed that the api is gone, with no way to connect but their official app.
Guess I'll just tell everyone that matters my phone number and mail address, if they do not already know, and call it a day. I've wasted so much of my time and attention on facebook.
Meh, this is just MSN all over again. This seems to be some kind of weird cycle the Internet goes through, I'm sure eventually an open protocol will thrive...we're just not there yet.
I've been trying to figure out where Facebook chat is going to end up -- the only thing I care about: will there be a way for me to build a simple, command-line client that can use an API/interface that's document and won't disappear over night? As far as I can gather the answer from Facebook is: "Fuck off! This is a revenue platform for us, and we're too big to care about any additional network effects a more open system could generate."
Of the current crop of messaging platforms, I'm cautiously leaning on Signal (it works with sms, I might get some of the people I actually communicate to use it -- even if I would prefer it was more federation/multi-server/self-host friendly) and http://www.mattermost.org/ for an xmmp/irc/etc work-a-like.
I've given up the idea of using IM with facebook users, iMessage users, or Google hangout users. I might occasionally use slack or gitter[1] via the irc interface, or very rarely via the awful web interface (not they're any worse than other web interfaces, but it's just as gaudy and slow and insecure as other web apps, by virtue of being a web app (image libraries, font rendering have issues, they require downloadable code (js) to run -- they can be expected to have a security record comparable to MS office documents with macros enabled)).
I somehow don't see the irc interface to gitter and slack as being good ways to integrate with a single Android app though. Maybe mattermost will help with that, so I can have one app that does sane IM+SMS, and one that does email. Hopefully without the "5 different accounts that can't talk with each other"-nonsense of having separate AIM, XMPP, MS messenger accounts in a single monster-client. It was barely tolerable on the desktop, I won't abide it on my cell phone.
I am indeed sad people couldn't just get together and agree on a sane XMPP sub-set with client-server and server-server TLS, and optional server-side message storage.
But that didn't happen, so now I'll just be without a "big" messaging/chat service (other than IRC, IRC still works).
Yep, it's not like we don't have open protocols with millions of users. Data silos and super nodes in the network are a socio-economic effect, not technical. What I mean is that as long as it's desirable to become a high traffic, high authority node, there will be people (and corporations) spending time and money to build them -- I think it's an emergent property of human society + resource scarcity.
Unfortunately, every open-protocol chat implementation attempted thus far has failed due to commoditization and spam. Nobody has been able to figure out a way to make them still useful to the masses.
It seems like Facebook first set out to capture the whole market, and are now slowly monetizing it fully. WeChat has achieved incredible ARPU (>$7/user/year) through a combination of chat APIs, 3rd party bots and integrated payments Facebook. If Facebook can achieve a similar number, it would greatly increase their worldwide ARPU. (http://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-...).
The ARPU # is mis-leading. According to the Economist article, 85% of the revs are from gaming, not "to hail a taxi, order food delivery, buy movie tickets, play casual games, check in for a flight, send money to friends, access fitness tracker data, book a doctor appointment, get banking statements, pay the water bill, find geo-targeted coupons, recognize music, search for a book at the local library, meet strangers around you, follow celebrity news, read magazine articles, and even donate to charity."
I asked a Uber driver in China why he thought DiDiKuaiChe (local competitor) was more popular, and he said "because you can order one through WeChat... And everyone has WeChat"
Of those services, gaming is probably the most mature which is why it generates the most revenue, but give it a few years and I'm sure more of those will become far more significant..
It is now time to take all the innovations that have been happening in china around WeChat/WeiXin and to implement them into messenger. This time it's the other way around, we are actually going to copy the Chinese (they have had an API addressable messaging platform way before us and are ahead of us in the exploration of what work / is possible) :
- this may disrupt Local business/shop relation to client. (see how weixin is used by small online shop)
- this may disrupt insurance (see how zhongan is selling micro-insurance through weixin)
- this may disrupt paypal, as soon as you can send 'money' over a messaging app.
- this may disrupt movie / theater ticket selling
... (there is tones of other example)
There is a lot of land to grab, the working use cases are already known (we get 5 year of china market data). I hope I had a couple of millions to invest in this market.
> - this may disrupt paypal, as soon as you can send 'money' over a messaging app.
American banking is so backwards and this will only make it worse.
In Australia and New Zealand, no bank offers you checks. Do I own you $50? Well give me your BSB and account number. I type it into my phone app or web browser, type $50 and click send. It shows up tomorrow morning. Works on weekends, holidays, ANZAC day, New Years Day and no fees. $0. Person-to-person transfers are free, move in 24 hours and your account number doesn't need to be private.
I came back to America back to the world of three business days for an electronic ACH payment to clear (if you're lucky)!! WTF?! Our banking system is in the 1990s because PayPal, Square and now Facebook will lobby to keep their business models.
Fuck. That. Shit. Money should move through the banking system using standards, not via Facebook with their proprietary PayPal like garbage.
> Our banking system is in the 1990s because PayPal, Square and now Facebook will lobby to keep their business models.
I find it thoroughly unbelievable that banks are trying to offer advanced, consumer-friendly features, only to be thwarted by the lobbying efforts of the technology industry. Don't get me wrong: technology companies are not morally superior and above political manipulation, but they would most certainly lose going head-to-head with the banking industry.
The banking system is stuck in the 1990s because banks have insufficient incentive to change, and there is a non-trivial segment of the population lacking knowledge of, access to, or trust in technology when it comes to financial matters.
The UK has the same but instant (technically 2 hours, but I've never seen it take that long) up to £100,000, works 24/7, free for personal (and v cheap for business - usually 30p up to 100k, or cheaper for start up business accounts).
Next day would seem as backwards as US ACH to us now :).
I don't think the average kiwi has seen a cheque in decades. After 10 years of living in the US I have started to rejoice in how despite being one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth the US still clings to things like paper cheques, $0.01/$0.05/$0.10 coins, US customary units, and a plumbing system that requires most houses to own a plunger. Perhaps it's a sign of assimilation?
I've literally never owned a plunger in my whole life, and I don't know anybody who does. It baffles me everything I'm in the US and every toilet has a plunger!
I don't think any toilet built here in Finland since at least the 50's (some of those still exist, earlier I'm not sure of) have needed a plunger either, those things just work. The US plunger thing just baffles me. And banking too, sure.
Not that I'm aware of. Lived in NZ for 5 years and just moved into a brand new construction in CA just a few months back. Terrible. I've had to plunge(technically I use the scrubber to generate the pressure) a few times already :(
Also, the showers mostly all have baskets under the drain caps to capture hair and stuff now.
I can only speak for New Zealand, but the whole disposal method is fundamentally different. Instead of relying upon the swirling/draining motion to dispose of the waste, water is forced straight down into the much larger gap. Every kiwi/aussie who has stayed with me (in multiple homes) has complained about US toilets!
> Instead of relying upon the swirling/draining motion to dispose of the waste
It makes me sad and annoyed whenever I flush one of these toilets. The swirling doesn't do anything useful. It seems to actually increase the clogging probability because it typically manages to swirl 100% of the toilet paper together and then finally move it downward all at once for maximum clogging effect, which might be fine if the drain weren't ~2 inches across.
There are American toilets that aren't like this, but a shocking number of them are completely unreliable. I had a toilet in my apartment in California that, no lie, I managed to clog by blowing my nose. I used 3 Kleenex, dropped them in the toilet, and flushed. It clogged from that.
Some newer toilets in the US will have this, but it's not nearly as common as it is in AU. I figure it's because of differing attitudes on water conservation.
Nearly every home I have ever been into in the US owns a plunger due to poor performance of US toilets. Every kiwi who has stayed with me has had issues. I think the biggest proof of how useless they are is the fact that if you go to Home Depot and browse their toilets you will see the "flush performance" heavily featured in the marketing. As far as I can tell it's due to how the waste is disposed of (relying upon a draining/swirling motion rather than forcing water straight down) and the size of the outlet. I actually had the lower level of a house destroyed by a toilet that was blocked and overflowed. It just doesn't happen back in New Zealand!
At least ACH is slowly working towards being faster. In less than 2 years, next business day ACH should be pretty universal. In about 6 months, some ACH transactions will clear the following morning.
Btw., being from the Czech Republic, I have never used a cheque in my not-so-short life. The bank transfers take here from 0 seconds (within the same bank, costs 0 in my case), through a few hours/usually (within CZ, costs 0) to around two days (within EU, costs 0.7€).
Paypal is used here because of the ease to pay abroad and competes with Visa/Mastercard mainly.
can you elaborate more on zhongan and micro-insurance? thanks! is it basically just chatting with an agent over weixin instead of chatting face-to-face or over the phone?
Back in 2009, Google Talk toyed with a similar idea of realtime chat as a platform for other applications to build on. [0] The demos were very neat at the time, but it turned out to be a brief detour along a road that ended with Google stripping out extensibility and interoperation from Google Talk and building it into the service we now know as Google Hangouts.
I love the idea of chat as a platform, but Facebook will need to convince developers it won't close the door on them down the road.
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.
> 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.
Is that accurate? If I build a chat-based application, why can't I build out interfaces to various services? It may not be trivial, since some will offer features that others don't, but what's the principal problem preventing me from building a chat-based application that works over Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, Kik, etc. so long as they each provide an API for connecting these bots, beyond time?
I'm blanking on any names right now, but I've seen a few startups recently working on platforms for building bots with integrations to multiple different services. No doubt one or more of these will add Messenger support. There are also open source projects like Lita[0], BotBuilder[1], and Hubot[2] which give a nice abstraction layer.
Ok, I must be missing something. How is FB Messenger here anything other than a means of connecting to customers? If the concern is that FB will ape your app, then your app isn't sufficiently differentiated from their offerings.
I want to write a game server, say for Go (the game, not the language). I want to make one (or the sole) method of connecting to it FB Messenger (hypothetical, not actually doing this, and the real game server is just for my edification on learning Erlang). Yeah, this won't go very far. Once FB decides to pull a Yahoo! Games clone out they'll crush me unless I offer something sufficiently different to Go players, but outside a network of players, there's not much to offer that FB can't copy (and FB can, in fact, offer that network of players so I'm lost there too).
However, if I'm Papa Johns or Marcos Pizza or ..., FB can't shut me out. They're not going to get into the food production and delivery business. And if they did, those companies are hardly tied uniquely to FB's platform. They already have their websites, phone apps, phone numbers and other means of placing orders.
> However, if I'm Papa Johns or Marcos Pizza or ..., FB can't shut me out.
That's not true. FB doesn't have to get into the food delivery business to shut someone out.
Imagine that FB's plans come true and talking with bots on Messenger becomes an incredibly popular way for people to order pizza. A lot of people can't imagine ordering a pizza any other way. Let's say you're Pappa John's and 60% of your business comes from Messenger. Now FB has incredible leverage over you, since they effectively control a huge chunk of your revenue stream. They could decide to kick you off unless you pay them a lead gen fee, since they're generating leads for your business. Or, they could start to offer "premium" service, where message response times are slowed down unless you're a paying premium customer. Or, heck, maybe a competitor would even pay FB in a strategic partnership to kick you off. The point is that FB is set up to have incredible leverage and government-like power, and it is a very safe bet that they will do everything they can to extract taxes from the businesses that depend on them.
The bottom line is that if people are using your app because it's on Messenger, and it's not that people are using Messenger because of your app, FB has much more leverage than you do, and you are entirely at their mercy. They are very likely to take advantage of that power dynamic in one way or another.
Couldn't FB leverage their platform to strike better deals with, in the pizza example, Papa John's competitors? And then shut down Papa John's FB platform (or sunset some critical API functionality)? Facebook could also build their own 'pizza ordering' bot, and then force any pizza vendor to go through that bot (and pay), while simultaneously shutting down any other implementation of the same idea.
Imagine being Venmo and trying to implement Venmo over Messenger now that FB has Payments. Likely not going to happen, and the risk any business takes jumping into a closed platform is huge (especially with FB's history). Just like all of my favorite Spotify plugins that were shutdown and replaced with either no alternative or Spotify's chosen 'replacement'.
I want to write a reply to everyone, why does this have to be a tree and not a graph.
Facebook makes money off businesses using Facebook to connect to customers. They barely make money directly off customers.
It should be expected that FB will disrupt any digital service. Be that payment (peer-to-peer, customer-to-business), access to digital media (video, image, news, music). What they won't do is replace music studios. They won't replace movie studios. REPLACE is key. They may make entries into content production, by partnership or a standalone venture, but they will not cut out other content providers. FB's network is predicated on access. Cutting off customer access to things they want is a surefire way to lose those customers. Yes, FB can make the terms more onerous for businesses, particularly competitors. But they will suffer if they push it too far and end up backing off or flailing about wildly until they fail. Most likely, they'll back off.
Amazon with Amazon Prime Video has not cut out access to different movie and television studio content just because they make their own. Same with Netflix and Hulu. If they were to do so, the value they provide to consumers would go to near-zero. There'd be no reason to subscribe to their services if you only got their (limited) content. Who wants to spend $8/month for one channel's worth of content anymore when that gets you dozens of channels with a competitor?
Same thing with news, video games, and just about anything else.
If your product is really just acting as a middle man, expect a Google or FB or Amazon to step in and screw you. Yes.
So exist on the outside. Make the games, not the game room. Make the movie, not the theater. Make the music, not the stage. Make something that the middle-man's customers want, let the middle-man do his job of connecting you to those customers (well, contract with them).
That's a reasonable point, but "sufficiently differentiated from their offerings" is pretty broad. Anything that's not a physical service could be considered insufficiently differentiated, not to mention that they could screw you much worse than simple imitation. Gussying up your idea and presenting it in a more integrated manner through internal APIs would be tame compared to the fact that they can actually revoke your API access. If they don't want to compete with you, they can completely shut you out, period.
Right. If I make a business connecting small business inventory lists to FB messenger so people can find out what's there to buy/steal (hey, you know someone will eventually think of this), FB will eventually offer this. Or Square (being in a better position right now to do so, FB isn't in the point-of-sale system yet). This pretty much means that if you build any middle-man business, you should expect it to fail in the long-run (at best, get acquired), unless you can develop a sufficiently large network to stand on your own (very hard at this stage, but not impossible).
Make the video games, ideally not casual or not simply implementations of existing, public domain, games like chess or something. Make the music. Make the movies. Make the articles. FB and others will connect you to customers because that's their value proposition to customers: connecting you to the things you want. They have no need to connect you to a middle man when they can be the middle man (why would they connect you to Steam or GoG, when they can replace those platforms in short order?).
Google Reader was one of many means of connecting to RSS. It became the de facto means for a lot of people, and it was a serious blow to RSS when it shut down despite the existence of alternatives.
No one built a business dependent on RSS except for people in the business of building RSS aggregators. No content provider was effectively shut out of the marketplace (of content providing) by the death of Google Reader.
My point was that anyone building a business on top of Messenger that cannot stand alone is, probably, in trouble. But that's always been the case regardless of the base technology. What apps can be built on Messenger? Content delivery, potentially. Random data connectors like weather updates or where's-my-package. How can those apps stand alone against a behemoth like FB or Google or anyone else? They can't.
The point, then, is to build applications that make use of Messenger, but are not replicable by FB. Facebook isn't going to replace my FLGS. So how about I connect my inventory to an chat app so people can ask me if I have something they want? It cuts into my spur-of-the-moment sales when people come in, can't find Settlers of Catan, but see Dominion and buy it instead. But it also gives customers a better experience, and me a better understanding of what customers want (I got 20 queries for Catan this week, I should order a few copies).
Now, if I build a business which connects shop inventories to FB chat, I might be in trouble. FB can tear me apart in a heartbeat by building a small-business-inventory-chat-bot. And that's the way the world goes.
Don't build a company on Messenger that FB can replicate. Build connections to other businesses. FB won't be a bank. FB won't be a restaurant. FB won't be an Amazon. FB won't be a local small business. FB won't be a caterer. FB won't be a plumber.
EDIT: I'm tired, and this came out poorly formed. I may write another response later that's clearer once I've rested and reread this.
And that may be perfectly fine right now. But if they change their TOS tomorrow that says you're not allowed to do that and shut you down because of it you're good and fucked. They have all the users. They have the platform the users are on. Therefore they hold all the cards.
They're unlikely to do that. First, it's practically impossible to enforce a "don't use other messaging platforms" clause. I mean, they'll be pulling in a lot of companies early on that use SMS or similar to interface with customers already. Messenger is just going to be one part of those companies' communication arsenal. Second, if they did, you'd see lawsuits or major players leaving (for the same reason as #1, they're already on other platforms, they don't want to shut them down). A business needs to connect with as many customers as possible. If 80% of customers are on FB, and 70% are on Google, and 99.9% are on SMS, connecting to each of those platforms makes sense. But only one of them makes sense to use exclusively. Those are made up and wildly wrong numbers, but the real numbers will bear this concept out. FB won't have 100% of a business's chat-based customers, and unless they have > 90 or 95%, then exclusivity would be absurd.
As I said in my original comment, Twitter made a spectacular show of getting immense traction thanks to their universe of third party developers and then changing their TOS to effectively shut them down once they felt they didn't need them anymore. The situations aren't 100% the same (they never are), but my concerns aren't unfounded.
The Twitter debacle doesn't seem entirely relevant here
Twitter's API was being used to build apps that replicated and competed with Twitter's own functionality and created a conflict of interest between Twitter and 3rd party developers
There isn't much else you can do with this Messenger API other than to create channels of communication between businesses and their existing and potential customers. Those businesses likely wouldn't know how to make this themselves, so you could make a bit of money there.
This wouldn't compete with Facebook, but rather ties both customers and businesses tighter to Facebook, making FB more valuable to those businesses and and perhaps encourage them to spend more on promoting user engagement.
There'd be no reason Facebook would want to shut you down. They certainly don't want to get into the nitty gritty business of connecting chat messages to all the various ways different businesses could function.
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 isn't a conspiracy theory, this is something you can observe by yourself.
Facebook has already broadcasted loud and wide how they are going to screw you over. It's your choice.
The 'real' question is how can we build an alternative platform that doesn't require you to try to 'win' by effectively screwing the people who actually use the stuff you build.
There's also a word for people who don't try to understand what someone else is trying to say and just tries to impose his own idea to everyone else by calling them names: "assholes".
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.
> Instagram - used Facebook for viral distribution and eventually eclipsed Facebook Imgur - built image hosting for Reddit and now has eclipsed Reddit.
Uh, not quite. Imgur would still die if Reddit went away. Same for Instagram. If Twitter and FB went away, it'd die.
You could argue the same for the App Store, Play store, etc. This is the reality: you can reach these vast numbers of users on these platforms through these stores. Facebook isn't forcing anyone to do this, but they are providing an opportunity. If you don't want to be part of this then thats your choice.
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).
They had an XMPP interface, yes. It allowed you to sign into FB Messenger using any XMPP client. But it was very limited and did not follow modern XMPP practices. Then they killed it in favor of MQTT, which isn't even an IM protocol.
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.
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.
Indeed. It's unbelievable that FB has the audacity to shamelessly put this out there as if we've not been down this road and don't know how the story ends.
Maybe they're counting on a new generation of starry-eyed would-be "FB entrepreneurs" to drink the Kool-aid. But, anyone who was there the first time around ought to know better.
This seems kinda disappointing in capability compared with what you see in WeChat. I was expecting you'd be able to build apps that run from inside messenger, instead of toggle back and forth between native apps, possibly using something like ExponentJS/Reactive-Native, but maybe Apple would disapprove.
The WeChat SDK allows apps to run JS from inside WeChat itself. You see this in action in China where you can actually do complex stuff like book a taxi via Didi Dache without necessarily having to switch back and forth between heavyweight apps.
And now your messenger app needs a launcher, switcher, notification manager, search, per-app settings pages, etc. And maybe its own process model/scheduler, to prevent rogue apps from slowing down the messenger app. And apps within the messenger app now need to be cross-messenger-platform on top of being cross-webview-platform.
I guess I was thinking of cruft differently. All the messaging and bots are reducing UIs back down to CLIs again. Which is pretty much the sparest UI there is. Except perhaps for voice, the other UI gaining traction on mobile. So, yes, the physical size of mobile devices is reducing practically all the cruft.
Have a look at what we're doing with our startup: https://platform.happening.im - it's exactly what you're describing: a (group) messenger that allows third party developers to create their own HTML5-based apps that can have complex functionality and/or interfaces.
The top feature of any software platform is "can reach hundreds of millions of users". Solve that problem first and then maybe you'll be able to entice developers to build on your platform.
Actually, I recall this platform from being quite popular in the Netherlands for a while. It received quite some media attention and a lot of people I know used it. It's not hundreds of millions, but it definitely had some reach!
Am I the only one that keeps some separation between different platforms?
For example, there are people I follow on Snapchat, but I have absolutely no interest doing the same on Facebook Messenger. My Facebook is still mostly people I have met in real life and care about, that and groups I am a part of because social life.
I don't want to adulterate that with chat bots, and ordering pizza and any other integrations. In reality I spend very little time in Facebook messenger and have zero interest in increasing the amount of time I spend on Facebook.
Clearly this isn't for you then. I, however, use messenger frequently - too frequently. And I welcome all these changes, as they are really maturing the platform and making it a delight to use.
I have a group chat on messenger of all my friends, and when they added the simple options to change the group colours, add nicknames, and even change the default emoji to something other than a thumbs up, messenger became a whole lot more fun to use.
I can't wait to see how it develops with these changes.
Honestly, because I needed karma so I could confirm this account on keybase. So I jumped on the homepage and commented on something I thought relevant to me.
I agree completely. My Snapchat friends are nothing like my Facebook friends (since by definition we keep up in very different ways) and my Twitter feed contains very little from either. And then there is the microscopic overlap between any of those social networks and my Xbox Live account.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the bots bandwagon - Microsoft, Facebook, Slack etc. Do we really think this kind of text-based interaction is the future?
Granted, it's an interface practically everyone knows how to use, but I believe it could result in rather long conversations (what are the available commands/questions?) to actually get something a little more complex done.
Our messaging startup is heading in the opposite direction: we offer fully functional tools and games that can be instantly used by groups of people. We also offer a platform that allows developers to create these HTML5 based apps themselves. If you think this sounds interesting, have a look at https://platform.happening.im .
Natural languages are terrible interfaces. They're linear, verbose, inexpressive, ambiguous. Clearly, we need a computer-assisted language to elevate humanity's ability to communicate.
Such a platform could be as important as Gutenberg's printing press.
Software is fragmented. This leads to poor user experience.
- I have 100+ apps on my phone
- I have 1000+ online accounts
I need to discover these apps/websites/services, repeat the same information over and over again, learn their features and limitations. They don't talk to each other, which means that I need to continuously update them. We're humans, we're smart, we adapt easily, we got used to it, we don't even notice. However, when you take a step back and look at it, it's a mess.
Generally, when I try to show the problem to people, they blame the user. They say there's no need to use that many systems. And they're right. In the real world, I can get by using only English (or in my case, French) as a general-purpose communication interface.
The problem with software is that people tend to associate one system with one use-case. One app for this, one app for that. Do one thing, and do it well. That's the general direction a lot of software is going in (i.e., Facebook Messenger vs Facebook). When people tell me I should use fewer systems, they also imply that I should accept to cover fewer use-cases with software. And while most people think it's reasonable not to use software for various things (unlock doors, turn on lights, preheat oven, change channel, pay goods, track calories), I consider them short-sighted. We can't afford to choose which activities deserve the power of software and which can continue to be done the old-fashion (and so-called "simpler") way. We need software everywhere.
Beyond the consumer-facing UX fragmentation problems, as an application developer, I'm exposed to the even uglier side of things. The arbitrary design process, the compromise-ridden business decisions. Most people have no idea how expensive (in time and resources) it is to build the simplest of software in the real world. Take 100 different teams, and they'll all design the same system in completely different ways, repeating the very same mistakes. How many different user authentication systems have been implemented in the world? How many caching layers? How many ORMs? How many online stores (all with pretty much the very same features, from the image gallery to the cart). This is insane. This makes SAP look sexy.
Now, take the top 100 most popular apps and websites. List out all of their features. Remove duplicates. Remove duplicates. Generalize. Remove duplicates. You'll realize they all share 80% of the same features, probably more. Don't be tricked by functional synonyms. A like, an upvote, a favorite, a share, a retweet, a rating, a pin. They're all the same things. You can reduce the functionalities of most app to a very simple vocabulary. Basically, people have things, people want things. The only challenge is in describing things. And that's what we need a tool for.
# SOLUTION
The customer is NOT king.
Stop thinking that software should be tailored to its users. People don't know what they want. People have a tendency to under-generalize. They think that because two things look different, they're different. They're wrong.
There is not as much difference between hailing a cab, ordering a pizza, sharing a video, shipping a package, flying to Hawaii, renting a room, sending money, taking an elevator, and selling your couch, as people are lead to believe. They're essentially the same things, and software should treat them as such.
We need a general purpose communication platform. Not one monolithic app to which all possible features were added, but something that can be extended to a wide array of use cases. I'm not talking about plugins, micro-apps, or a web browser. These usually give too much freedom to developers, which once again results in fragmentation. I'm talking about a language, English on computer-steroids.
By communicating through a computer, this language gains access to the world's knowledge. This language can challenge your thoughts. This language can predict your thoughts. You only need to be as verbose as what the language doesn't already know about you. With time, the language becomes more like a to-do list a la Google Now (i.e., tells you what to do next) than a notepad. This language is your interface with the past, present and future world.
English is text-based and linear. You start from nothing, then a word, then a sentence. I don't want a language where you start with nothing. Start with the entire state of the entire world (as some sort of hyper-graph), communicate by editing it. Edit edges, introduce new nodes. One place for every idea. Never repeat, support instead. Invest your social credit to augment the credibility/value of facts. Use it as a way to describe both the past, present, and future (prediction and/or wish). Follow the path of PROLOG, RDF and lojban.
Graph-oriented communication is what the world needs. I believe we can make it accessible, not without a learning curve, by the use of inference and custom renderers. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I can't foresee it not being done.
I'm working on Retrace, "Graph-oriented communication" for sharing the ups and downs of experiences via a waveform interface. Reach out if you'd like to chat!
But they're simple. Both for users and developers. Also, bots offer a very familiar UI pattern. And a chat log is suitable (but not ideal) for a lot of things. (See slack integrations)
It's going to be interesting to find out if/when tailored user interfaces can actually beat the log. (And too what degree platforms such as fb messenger will offer extensibility).
Disclaimer: Happening co-founder, we obviously gamble on the tailored interfaces.
The 1-800-FLOWERS example in the F8 livestream was pretty neat. In the example a user ordered flowers through only a chat.
Somehow they were able to do this without entering their credit card details. I wonder if the payment was a Facebook Messenger feature, or if the user had just already entered their details on the 1-800-FLOWERS site.
You've been able to setup a US debit card with your Messenger account and then use that to send friends money, so you can use that payment info with the Messenger platform integrations too. I'm guessing that FB processes the payment versus sending the partner your payment info.
Here's more info on payments in Messenger, but note that this doesn't include info on the platform stuff and how payments interact with it since it's brand new:
You choose A, Facebook wins. You choose B, Facebook wins.
I believe WhatsApp and FB Messenger are the two top chat networks right now (sadly), at least when looking at regional dominance. And since the value of a network to the individual is dependant on the size, AND they're locked up, they win whatever you choose.
You might loose because you chose the network with less friends, but that changes nothing in the end.
How is this not different from the strategy MS used to follow either kill opponents or buy them? How did the anti trust dept of US allow whatsapp acquisition since it literally made FB king of everything digital?
Mostly because they still have tons of competitors in the messaging space and they're not leveraging their success in social networking to force success in messaging. I'm personally reachable from 10-15 different forms of messaging (and neither WhatsApp nor FB messenger), and most people probably have at least 4-5 so it's a really tough argument that because of Facebook users have to use WhatsApp or FB messenger.
They showed a graph in the keynote, WhatsApp for one-on-one communication, Messenger for small group communication. So they see them as different use cases.
They may not have that data in a form useful for comparison, and the data may conflict with your assumption. Intra business politics / desired integrations / engineering reasons can dissuade teams from a pure data-based decision.
Not for Brazil, at least. Here, most people use WhatsApp: local and even larger business are starting to list their WhatsApp number in advertising, even radio stations use it for users to send messages instead of calling.
And it's even hard to spot a Java-applet based phone. Even the lowest classes just use cheaper or older Androids.
Messenger and WhatsApp are popular in different regions but combine both and you have the lions share of worldwide mobile chat users. For example, Messenger is much more dominant in the US, while WhatsApp is crazy popular in places like Brazil or Germany. So i guess they are just starting with the US market (Messenger) and will eventually offer similar stuff on WhatsApp.
I'm thinking that either they are really afraid of messing up WhatsApp like how the current and previous Skype owners messed up, or else it is part of the purchase deal to mainly stay out of WhatsApp.
The whole end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp doesn't seem in the Facebook spirit at all.
But they can't really monetize chat by inserting ads. That would be a dumb thing to do, even if we assume most users don't care about privacy. Well, the reality is even those who don't really don't like having an AI spitting out an ad in the middle of your chat with friend.
Everyone read this [0] and now think it's The Next Big Thing™. That and Slack, I guess?
I don't get it either. The nice thing about not typing out requests ("it's not a command-line interface," they all say) to perform virtual actions is that you don't have to type out requests to perform virtual actions. And having different apps and websites for different purposes gives you choice, privacy, and control over who you interact with online. You don't have to get locked in to a platform and hope they never do anything nefarious or user-unfriendly for fear there's nowhere else to turn.
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.
I just checked out some of the previous HN posts about matrix.org - I´d love something like it to become widely used... in the same way that I'm hoping for a Mozilla Persona, diaspora, etc. to become succesful.
Is that ever going to happen though? With all this money going to centralised products?
Probably not, which is why I said "hope." I'm doing my part by working on implementations of matrix.org components myself. Obviously, I can't predict the future, but I think it's unlikely any open system will "beat" or even compete meaningfully with the big proprietary systems. It's like a small group of well meaning political activists thinking they can beat lobbyists with unlimited funds. It's an army vs a couple people wielding sticks.
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.
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.
Funny thing - the bot you described is essentially a CLI. I'm willing to bet that at least some of the same people who happily used it would also be terrified by the real command line.
Reminds me also of an observation that a lot of people in accounting are actually programming without realizing it, by virtue of making pretty complex Excel spreadsheets to automate their work.
It's funny how much of users' apparent inability to grok computers is actually in their heads. Also, the fetishization of GUIs that has been going on for the past two decades is actually quite sad - it robs people of efficiency and convenience in using the machine.
If they were so popular, why do they still not exist in any meaningful sense to this day?
I was all over IMified & ActiveBuddy when they came out 10-15 years ago but they never really took off at all. My agent basically returned the Google "magic box" which was kinda cool.
People are talking about sharecropping, but this seems to me like they're trying to make Slack-like integrations for the general (non-dev) public. Can someone explain why this is different from Slack's model of using their platform to make apps?
Also people sound like they want to make money from an app on Facebook's platform. But I'd think that to consider making your start-up off someone else's platform is just a bad idea to begin with. Maybe have integrations to the messenger app from your app, but making an entire app on the messenger platform is a bad idea.
For a while, Messenger supports some partners-only kind of program for bots. For example, if someone posts @dailycute then a random image from imgur aww is posted [0].
I am quite interested whether they have plans to extend this and make it more open (some kind of chat apps so that you can't just reserve a bunch of good keywords with non functioning bots?).
Does anyone see Messenger as a potential Skype for business/Slack/Hipchat competitor? I feel like the technology is on par, but the link to my personal facebook kills it for me.
In the meantime, Facebook still hasn't gotten around to allowing 1-to-1 messages from users on mobile websites, and probably never will. Sharing on your wall, sure, but send something privately? Sorry, we haven't gotten around to fixing that 4-year-old bug yet. (Even weirder, it works fine in desktop browsers...)
I mean from our website, not Facebook's. You can use the Fbook API to share (1-to-many) on mobile websites, but you can't use the "send" functionality to send a private 1-to-1 message. It's surely not a technical issue, I'm assuming Fbook just decided never to implement it.
Ah ha... Now I understand why they pulled Messenger out of the core FB app. So they could badger people for a year to install an intrusive application (or never be able to read those notifications the FB app keeps sending you without firing up a web browser) that would ultimately be leveraged as a B2C marketing platform.
You don't see the difference between this and hanging around with a phone to your ear listening to an audio user-interface synchronously waiting until it's ready for you to input commands with your numpad?
The big difference seems to be that bots built on this platform are not to be used as an ad delivery mechanism, like, say, outbound.io. The App Review section of the docs makes this a little clearer of what is acceptable and what isn't, complete with graphics:
As much as I don't like Telegram weird pseudo-crypto, I really like what they are doing with their bot API and the messenger is really good in general.
Interestingly if you try and set up a Messenger Bot, there is a one-time fee of $99[0] to take advantage of Customer Matching - where they use phone numbers you have to find existing customers to contact.
Welcome to the future friends when we must pay to battle the keymasters and gatekeepers on their terms to do what we used to do ourselves, for free.
First they took my RSS, then they took my XMPP... Who can guess whats next?