We are living in a Messaging era!
The western world is living in a selfcentered — bubble, often missing the new trends and playing catch on. But the East is showing the way to the future.
The Chinese have already shown us the future of Messaging: 600 million people each month book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors’ appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving the WeChat app.
“The messaging era is definitely now,” says David Marcus VP of Facebook Messenger. “It’s the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone” says Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s easy to see why Facebook is taking messaging so seriously. The next big thing in Messaging is people talking to businesses. And thats just the beginning.
And Facebook is in the perfect position to make this happen. Connecting business and people via Messenger will usher us in a new era of sales, marketing and customer support.
Letting people communicate with businesses just as if they were friends — through simple conversation threads that would let them “make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information…
Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction.
Here comes the AI capability, called M, powered by Wit.ai, a startup acquired by Facebook last January. Imagine this scenarios:
“You can say, ‘I need to send chocolates to Marko this afternoon, can you take care of it?’ It knows who you are, who Marko is, his home address; it sends a nice messanger bubble with a suggested chocolates, and you just accept it and it’s done.” Also very close to this scenario is a startup and app called Operator. Mix of bot AI and human operators. This startup is going places.
Facebook owning the existing identification platform gives Facebook a distinct edge. Turning Messenger into a universal notification platform for the web — that’s huge. That’s when you really start hacking away at apps. That’s really powerful. Do you now need to install the [third-party] app? Both Apple and Google would like to do that. But they don’t have the web identification platform, unlike Facebook.
Messaging its the new people platform OS. Soon, there will be complete companies built on Messenger. Welcome to the EVERYTHING app :)
