Another walled garden chat? Why can't they develop a shared IETF supported standard (if XMPP isn't good enough for them)? It's a shame what a huge mess IM landscape has become because big players don't care about standardization and federation.
OK, so Everlane is a (mostly, originally) online-only clothing retailer that started Facebook messaging me about my order status, including shipping updates. Obviously, this is when you've auth'd with them via Facebook. Messages can include html, including images and map data, so they used that to show tracking progress with some nice branding. I always wondered how they did that.<p>Nice use of the platform. If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.
Nice way to try and lock in more facebook users. If I ever encountered a business requiring Facebook for communication, that'd be the end of my patronage.<p>Facebook isn't doing a good job of masking their desire to force everyone onto their site (e.g. 'free internet' in India).
The main reason as a developer that I'm trying to stop using anything related with the Facebook platform is that more and more of their APIs are private and only given access to a handful group of companies. This includes: messenger apis, graph apis, the recent shop/section tabs on pages, payments apis etc. It's becoming a huge walled garden.
Pretty sure this wasn't actually a secret, they announced Messenger Business integrations months ago <a href="https://www.messenger.com/business" rel="nofollow">https://www.messenger.com/business</a> ...
I'm seeing a fbchess option. @fbchess help returns:<p>@fbchess help
Start game with random colors: @fbchess play
Pick the colors: @fbchess play white/black
Pick the opponent: @fbchess play white John<p>Make a move: use Standard Algebraic Notation
@fbchess e4 or @fbchess Pe4 moves pawn to e4
Nbd2 to move knight from b-file to d2
B2xc5 to take on c5 with 2nd rank bishop
e8=Q to promote pawn to queen
0-0-0 or O-O to castle<p>Claim draw (e.g. 3-fold repetition): @fbchess draw claim
Offer a draw in the current position: @fbchess draw offer
Offer an undo of the last move: @fbchess undo<p>Resign: @fbchess resign
Show current position: @fbchess show
Show stats between current players: @fbchess stats
Continue a game from another conversation: @fbchess continue
From 1:1 conversation, @fbchess continue with [friend]
From group chat, @fbchess continue from [thread name]<p>@fbchess play actually initiates a game including a picture of the active chess board within the chat window.
IRC used to have all kinds of these bots back in the day. Mostly for downloading software. I remember even building one for the hell of it when I got bored one summer.
Throw away for obvs reasons. Lately I've started hating using facebook. I get spam on my feeds. I get spam on my notifications. I don't really talk to friends there. I only contact friends on rare occasions when an opportunity comes by.<p>I do use messenger to talk to people close to me. Most of the time I use other platforms to talk to teams, groups of friends, etc.<p>If I start getting spam on my inbox I'm joining a new platform and deleting my facebook account. Most of the content I get there is garbage. The only reason I haven't left yet is because of the Messenger app.
I hope they do the same for Whatsapp. Telegram has this awesome feature where a bot can send a menu, that feature opens huge possibilities for self-service processes in businesses. Most native apps that business develop do just that (consult balance, fill forms, buy more services, etc). Why the need to make businesses develop custom apps and users install them/use them when chat apps are already installed and users already trained to use them. Furthermore, it is quite simple to avoid abuse (spam) for instance Telegram bots have acces to user IDs and nicks only, a bot cannot send spam to a phone number or email. At some point, if FB does not open its chat apps the opposite will occur: want to get fast, easy, awesome support from a business? Install Telegram and chat with its bot.
So you abandon open protocols, and then try to be yet another whatsapp / snapchat / hangouts / skype / whatever the hell.<p>Didn't we do this in the 90s? We had AIM, Yahoo, and MSM. We learned that is stupid as hell, and we should just use the same protocol. So then they all supported XMPP.<p>And a decade later, the cycle repeats. Everyone walls up, tries to treat chat as this money pot, and I hope we can get back to open standards sooner rather than later. I'm sick and tired of not being able to talk to people easily and just resorting to email since thats the only common open protocol left people actually use.
The monetization possibilities here are unbelievable. Have keys to a platform with a billion users that use a product this often? I would kill for access :)
On the other end of this - this sucks. Anyone who has a Facebook page now has users encouraged to message them (and you get scored if you respond too late). Just found out this out later & it's a headache when you're trying to funnel people through your actual customer service channels and not trying to handle things on Facebook. ugh.
Glad thats too late. At least in my environment Facebook communication pretty much died out. I always wanted a bot, actually i always do on any platform, and i hated that they made it so super hard.<p>I may will use this for Advertisment tho once it gets public. I heard people on Facebook love to get ads thrown at their faces.