Facebook Messenger aims at businesses to connect more people
We mentioned back at the beginning of the month that Facebook planned to bring ads to its Messenger app, and now Mark Zuckerberg has said that Messenger will be opened to 40 pre-selected outside partners to build new "tools for expression" as its goal is to "help everyone around the world connect". Facebook wants to push its Messenger service out to businesses, they want customers to communicate through conversations threads which they called "interactive bubbles". David Marcus, Vice President of messaging products at Facebook said, "As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world". 

Marcus's team is working with middleware providers such as Zendesk and FedEx to integrate businesses seamlessly into Messenger. "User experience is all," explains Stan Chudnovsky, head of product management for messaging products, who also joined from PayPal. "The best user interfaces and least friction translates to happy consumers who spend more time on us." Which also means giving those consumers access to artificial-intelligence (AI) agents to help them find what they're looking for - even if such AIs need salary-earning human beings to augment their real-time capabilities. "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."

The AI capability, called M, is powered by Wit.ai, a startup acquired by Facebook last January. As Marcus describes it, M goes far beyond the informational role of Apple's Siri. "You can say, 'I need to send flowers to my wife this afternoon, can you take care of it?' It knows who you are, your home address; it sends a nice bubble with a suggested bouquet, and you just accept it and it's done. We're playing around with this, rolling it out in tiny ways to see if it's scalable. Our approach is very much one of trying crazy bold things. Some will work, some won't - those that will work we'll scale aggressively.

"We want to innovate in real-time communications - all the experiences that we have in video calls, or when you're texting and see somebody at the same time, without leaving the app. Group conversations are important to us, including live discussions, or different sets of task management for groups of people - you're on a mountain, trying to figure out who is where."

With his PayPal background, will Messenger also offer businesses a direct payment service? "We don't want to build a payments business," Marcus replies, "but we absolutely need to build a frictionless payment experience when people are in threads. If I have a flight open with KLM, I should be able to book my next flight and have a one-tap purchase experience. Same for e-commerce. The first baby steps are peer-to-peer payments in the US, which will expand into different countries." He sends a dollar to a colleague through the app to demonstrate.