I strongly believe messages will have to graduate from plain-text to structured for them to enable more interesting things. In fact, there exists a messaging product today with “smart” messages: Teamchat, built by my company Gupshup. We pioneered the concept of “smart” messages that have rich, interactive, clickable, webview elements right within the message. A few examples attached below. More examples on the website.

More importantly, developers can define handlers for each user action, enabling the messages to do smart things such as tallying votes, aggregating sales figures, mapping locations etc. Teamchat was designed from the ground up to support smart messages and intelligent bots, unlike most messaging apps that were designed with p2p messaging in mind and are now trying to retro-fit advanced capabilities.