Facebook Believes Messenger Will Anchor a Post-App Internet

Now with 900 million users, Facebook Messenger is how Facebook hopes to make good ol' chat the future of the Internet.
Facebook Believes Messenger Will Anchor a PostApp Internet
WIRED

The week before David Marcus will take the stage at Facebook’s annual F8 developers’ conference to announce new tools to help businesses interact with you and me on Messenger, he tries to explain his ambitious idea for the future. Sure, he’ll tell the throngs of developers gathering today at San Francisco’s scenic former US Army post, Fort Mason, about bots. He’ll announce a new bot platform, new ways to find apps, and an artificial intelligence-powered bot engine. At the end of the day, there’ll even be free Messenger messenger bags!

But all these announcements are just data points that herald something much grander, according to Marcus, who is vice president of messaging at Facebook. This is the kind of thing a product-focused serial entrepreneur like Marcus waits his whole career to be a part of. It’s the reason he quit his CEO job at PayPal two years ago to come run a then-tiny division of a social networking company. Marcus believes the Internet is reorganizing itself—again—and he wants to be the one who determines its future direction. His vision is that bots will drive a post-app world.

“Everybody wanted websites when the web was launched. And then everybody wanted apps,” he says, describing the launch of the iPhone. “This is the start of a new era."

Even two years ago, this idea seemed naively ambitious, and maybe even a bit preposterous. We were still complaining that Facebook’s Messenger (which, come on, we hardly ever used anyhow) was making us download a separate app if we wanted to use it (which, come on, meant we probably wouldn’t bother with it). But things have changed. We were wrong. Messenger has more than tripled it monthly active users to 900 million, and, says Marcus, they’re spending more time on it than ever.

What’s more, messaging platforms are becoming mini-webs—all-in-one spots for us to do way more than talk to our friends. For a glimpse of the future Marcus hopes for, look at Asian messaging platforms. Chinese users buy movie tickets on WeChat, play the lottery on it, shop on it and even book travel over it. Meanwhile, in North America, Kik recently launched a bot store where users can find and interact with bots like you might download apps on your iPhone. So far it’s been unclear whether people in the US want to use chat apps the same way. Unlike large parts of Asia, the US already has a large app ecosystem. If you want an Uber, it’s easy enough to just pull up your Uber app. But the going view among techies is that bots are just beginning to emerge. "Right now people's initial reactions of ' wouldn't it be great to order pizza via a bot or book an airplane ticket via a bot' may not be true in version one of these products," says Homebrew investor Hunter Walk, who invests in and advise companies evaluating whether to launch bots. "It won't be until we're creating native experiences that we find out what these bots are good for and what they can do that's different than what we can already do that we see the full potential of bots."

At the same time, it is clear that, apart from a shortlist of popular apps, most people just aren’t downloading a lot of apps anymore. Any given person spends 80% of her mobile time using her favorite three apps, according to ComScore. And few people go looking for new ones these days. As The Economist wrote in a recent issue, the market for apps is maturing as the costs of building and distributing them mount and consumers find them a hassle to navigate between them. That’s a problem for businesses and services that want to influence and interact with people on mobile devices—their options are shrinking.

The New Conversation

Marcus has always believed Messenger can be the perfect alternative. First, he had to develop a product so fast, efficient and delightful that everyone would use it to communicate. Marcus thought that once most people were on it, it could become the de facto network for them to interact with companies. But first he needed to introduce an unfamiliar way for people to use the service. If his team designed the interaction well, he believed, it could be a much simpler alternative to using the phone or web sites to interact with companies. Marcus started a year ago when the company announced Business on Messenger, which let businesses integrate into the chat app and communicate directly with customers. Early partners included startups like clothing company Everlane and bigger brands like Walmart and Hyatt, all of which experimented to figure out what worked. Messenger added Uber and Lyft among others as the year progressed.

If you haven’t really noticed these bots, that’s because they’ve kept their pilot projects small on purpose. The fight over becoming the dominant messaging platform is competitive—as Messenger goes head-to-head with everything from Slack to Snapchat—that Marcus can’t risk turning off the users he’s attracting by turning their Inbox into junk mail. So the Messenger team has moved relatively slowly, attempting to ensure that everything a user sees makes Messenger a better experience.

Now, Messenger is going big—opening its tools to anyone interested in trying them out. Starting today, any developer will be able to build a bot. Think of bots as robots—artificial intelligence-powered interactive software that simulates human conversations. (Kind of like if Siri were actually smart enough to know what you were talking about.)

Beyond building a snippet of software that enables simple conversations with people, Messenger has made a broader set of tools available to developers. “I think our definition of a bot is really wider than how the industry has defined it,” said Marcus. He notes that bots are usually limited to a single interaction and can therefore grow tedious without being useful, causing Messenger users to revert back to apps to conduct their business. He wants to unleash more structured and complex interactions on the Messenger platform—the kind a typical consumer might normally have with a company if she calls the 1-800 number. Developers will be able to build automated conversations, send and receive images, send and receive templates, and provide bubbles with prompts to save us the typing. So let’s say you’re flying to London later this month on KLM and you need to move the flight back a couple of days. You could message KLM and ask for a new booking. The airline wouldn’t need reference numbers because Facebook guaranteed your identity. It would write back with new flight options and you could secure the new flight and get your boarding pass delivered on Messenger.

Messenger will also open up software it developed as part of M, the personal assistant it launched in beta last summer. M was built by the team of people Facebook brought on when it acquired artificial intelligence startup Wit.ai. It's a virtual assistant that pairs algorithms with human trainers to one-up Siri and Cortana, accomplishing nearly any task for users enrolled in its beta test. Very quickly, they realized that without a human assist, M couldn’t answer every question; it wasn’t capable of managing complexity. A primary request needed to be dispatched to more narrow verticals—sub-bots—in order to help users have more nuanced conversations with the software. “To do that we built an internal tool that we are now going to open up to the world,” says Marcus. It’s called the bot engine. Developers don’t have to use the bot engine when building for Facebook, but they can use it if they want to build more complex tools.

All of these tools will be available immediately, and the bots will be released as fast as Marcus’ team can approve them. Marcus hopes businesses will take to Messenger to reach customers, take reservations, and even sell stuff.

Like the iPhone's First Apps

Marcus compares this period to the advent of Apple’s apps for the iOS platform back in 2008. “The first apps were kind of crappy,” he says. Most of the apps we use the most today couldn’t have existed back then because the platform wasn’t mature enough to support them. Similarly, tools like the bot engine will improve and design will evolve.

But if chatbots are the new apps, Facebook has no plans to build a bot store for Messenger. “It’s the wrong way to think about it,” says Marcus. “It's not as if you need to go buy something or download something; the interaction is much more seamless.” The service will focus on building helpful ways for people to discover bots.

To prepare for this shift, the company last week announced usernames, as well as links and Codes, all of which will help people more quickly connect with and talk to businesses (and sure, each other) on Messenger. Codes can be scanned using a smartphone camera to take people directly to a conversational thread. Links are short, catchy URLS combing a username with a page shortner (so mine would me m.me/jessihempel). Marcus speculates that soon you’ll be able to give out your Facebook username much the way you might now give out an email address: “People will be able to talk to you directly, and brands will be able to do that as well,” says Marcus. Also starting today, the company will build new discovery functions into the search bar, which will remain at the top of Messenger wherever you access it. When you tap on it, a menu will scroll down listing the people and groups you are most likely to want to message.

To show off a few ideas for how Messenger would like to see companies use its platform, it will launch with several partners. They include shopping site Spring, which has an image-rich shopping feature, and several news sites including CNN. And then there’s Poncho the weather cat, a fun-loving feline software with a bizarre sense of humor unleashed by Betaworks that already interacts with us as a bot on Slack. It’s fair to ask whether businesses will be as excited as Marcus about Messenger’s new opportunities. But Marcus points to the 50 million businesses that currently have Facebook pages, saying people are already messaging them through the messaging features on their pages. He anticipates that very quickly, they’ll perceive the demand for Messenger, at least as a communications channel.

Even if Marcus is right that people want to do business over Messenger, Messenger will need to get the balance right between personal and business correspondence. If Messenger becomes your junk mail, you won’t use it. But Marcus isn’t worried. “First of all the vast majority of these interactions are started by you,” he says. “And, we're going to launch very prominent user controls.” A “block” button at the top of each thread will allow us to ban certain messages permanently.

Also, Facebook will act as an aggressive middleman, relying on data to feed you exactly the number of commercial messages you will be willing to tolerate. “Unlike email where there is no one safeguarding the quality and the quantity of the stuff you receive, we're here in the middle to protect the quality and integrity of your messages and to ensure that you're not going to get a lot of stuff you don't want,” says Marcus.

If businesses take to Messenger, there will be plenty of opportunity for Facebook to make money. Marcus says the company is currently testing sponsored messages, which they may eventually charge for. And he believes there’s opportunity in helping businesses get discovered on Messenger.

Today, however, Marcus must begin by winning over the developers. There are so many platforms where they can put their coding skills to work, and so many opportunities for them to build cool things. As they amass in clusters to compare notes on what they hear at F8, he must convince them of the thing he has believed from the start: Chat is the future of the Internet. Messenger is the future of chat.