
Facebook has given some developers access to an unannounced Chat SDK - rachellaw
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/facebook-messenger-bots/
======
shmerl
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.

~~~
gkoberger
Counter argument: Standardization and federation comes at a cost. Facebook can
build a more cohesive product with interesting features by controlling the
ecosystem completely. That's the whole point; they gain nothing by just being
yet-another-protocol.

That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber. I use it (with
Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely mediocre experience
devoid of what makes FB Messenger special.

An example: FB lets you send one-click "likes". It's a great feature; it means
"acknowledged". Yet you can't send it with third-party clients, and third-
party clients receive it as a URL to an image of a thumbs-up. There's dozens
of features like this. How frustrating would it be if Facebook Voice Calls
only worked with some people, or someone's client didn't support group
messages?

~~~
shmerl
_> Standardization and federation comes at a cost._

At a cost that provides long term interopraibility benefits. But these just
care about short term rip offs and as well causing interoperability problems
for their users (i.e. preventing communication with other services). We must
be extremely lucky this didn't stay like that for e-mail.

 _> they gain nothing by just being yet-another-protocol._

That's the point. They measure their gain in how much they can mess up their
users (by preventing them from communicating with users of other services).
While gain should be measured in how useful such services can become
(enhancing, not crippling communication).

 _> That being said, Facebook does let you chat via Jabber_

It's not federated (which defeats the main purpose).

 _> I use it (with Messenger on OSX), and it works, but it's a completely
mediocre experience devoid of what makes FB Messenger special._

If they wanted to improve things and thought that XMPP can't reach that goal,
they could propose their non XMPP chat as IETF standard. Same as Google could
do with Hangouts and so on.

~~~
gkoberger
Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker
News. Ask them if they care about interoperability.

They won't understand the question. They have a FB app on their iPhone and
facebook.com on their desktop, and they won't understand what you mean.

If they want to message someone "on another service", they'll just use that
other service.

~~~
shmerl
_> Go find someone who uses Facebook Messenger and has never heard of Hacker
News. Ask them if they care about interoperability._

Many do complain about it, but can't do much to fix it. People either end up
installing 20 different clients to reach those who use other services (imagine
installing 20 browsers to read different sites or 20 e-mail clients to use
different e-mail accounts), or simply don't communicate with those users when
that number grows annoyingly large. This problem affects everyone, and it's
pretty apparent even to those who don't visit HN.

~~~
drumdance
I don't install 20 different clients, and the ones I do install are ones where
I want to keep things separate. I don't want Slack messages showing up in my
Facebook messages. I don't want Facebook messages showing up in Apple Messages
on OSX.

~~~
matt_kantor
Standard protocols and interoperability do not preclude this. Plenty of people
have separate work email addresses from their personal ones.

~~~
nl
And interestingly most people use separate clients for their work and personal
email accounts.

------
efields
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.

Nice use of the platform. If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes
sense to do your customer communication via Facebook, too.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Under what circumstances would one want to receive these sorts of messages
over a Facebook message instead of via email?

> If your user auths with Facebook, of course it makes sense to do your
> customer communication via Facebook, too.

If I've authed with you, it does not mean I want you to message me through
Facebook.

~~~
nlawalker
_> > Under what circumstances would one want to receive these sorts of
messages over a Facebook message instead of via email?_

If you're the kind of person who instead asks "Under what circumstances would
one want to receive these sorts of messages via email instead of over a
Facebook message?"

~~~
toomuchtodo
Forgive me, I'm over 30. I barely want personal messages in Facebook as it is.

~~~
stephenitis
I'm 28 and I have a 50/50 mix of people using Facebook messenger just like a
SMS. It's definitely a shift that is happening in people's comfort level with
social media as a primary comm channel.

~~~
Semaphor
29, my parents and their friends 60, 70+ all use whatsapp instead of SMS.
Whatsapp, Messenger, Google Talk, even Jabber… With modern smartphones it's
all the same, the only difference is who's on what which is why I hated when
everyone moved away from XMPP.

------
thieving_magpie
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.

Facebook isn't doing a good job of masking their desire to force everyone onto
their site (e.g. 'free internet' in India).

~~~
njovin
I've worked with the new Chat SDK and our customers' use cases aren't geared
toward forcing (or even encouraging) users into using Facebook Messenger. Most
of them are just trying to meet demand from their customers. In our particular
case, we have customers with a lot of international travelers who have access
to data while abroad but not necessarily SMS.

IMO it's a lot better than having a dedicated app you have to download to
interact with a specific brand.

~~~
thieving_magpie
I agree that it's a nice option to have and I doubt many companies care to
only provide one method of communication via Facebook. But there will be some,
as there have been in the past that wouldn't let me register for their
services since I didn't have facebook (Spotify at one point, another was a
productivity app that was featured on HN).

It just seems like a slow creep by FB to become (as cliched as this is
nowadays) 'too big to fail'.

------
base
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.

~~~
rudedogg
Several years ago I made a program to create ad variations for Facebook Ads. I
had to parse the page and submit the html forms because they wouldn't grant me
API access. A huge list of companies had access, and most of them had pretty
shitty apps to be honest.

I wrote a nice request for access, talking about the exciting features I'd
like to use the Ads API for, and how it could help advertisers make more
effective advertisements. They said no, and my business failed after a few
months. My users were basically risking losing their Ads account by using the
software, and it made marketing it very difficult.

I guess it pays to be connected, but it's difficult when you don't live near
San Francisco, etc.

------
carlosdp
Pretty sure this wasn't actually a secret, they announced Messenger Business
integrations months ago
[https://www.messenger.com/business](https://www.messenger.com/business) ...

------
frankacter
I'm seeing a fbchess option. @fbchess help returns:

@fbchess help Start game with random colors: @fbchess play Pick the colors:
@fbchess play white/black Pick the opponent: @fbchess play white John

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

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

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]

@fbchess play actually initiates a game including a picture of the active
chess board within the chat window.

------
bobby_9x
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.

~~~
rachellaw
What's fascinating is the bot-bandwagon is mirroring the early app market.

With apps, you downloaded things to do things. With bots, you integrate them
into things, so they'll do it for you. (Save extra step laziness)

~~~
WorldMaker
What worries me is that that this mirroring also applies to the erection of
giant walled gardens as well. It seems curious that this current bot-bandwagon
has exploded after the XMPP interoperation world imploded. Different APIs now
to build bots for Slack, Facebook, Google, Skype, etc...

~~~
rachellaw
I think it's in-combo with the whole AI/automated personalization as well. It
used to be very difficult to do intelligent bots, but now you have
tensorflow/caffe/word2vec frameworks that come built-in with NLP

The walled garden thing has always been an issue though. I mean Facebook threw
a fit when India turned down their "facebook-only" internet:
[http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-
finance/21685292-...](http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-
finance/21685292-critics-argue-mark-zuckerbergs-generosity-cover-landgrab-
facebooks-free-internet)

~~~
iofj
India didn't turn it down, it introduced it, and then other megacorps,
Microsoft up front, lobbied until it got outlawed.

------
ihuman
I've been looking for something like this ever since they deprecated their
XMPP Chat API. I hope this goes public soon.

~~~
iza
Pidgin has had a working plugin for a while:
[https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-
facebook](https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-facebook)

------
throaawaythrow
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.

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.

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.

~~~
maqr
> Throw away for obvs reasons.

Not super obvious to me, unless you work at Facebook. Is it really that much
of a social taboo to delete your Facebook account?

I've been refusing to sign up for about 11 years now and I'm pretty OK with
the social consequences.

------
bikamonki
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.

------
zanny
So you abandon open protocols, and then try to be yet another whatsapp /
snapchat / hangouts / skype / whatever the hell.

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.

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.

~~~
nl
_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._

I think you are misinformed.

AIM: Never supported XMPP

Yahoo: Never supported XMPP

MSN: Never supported XMPP

What happened was that someone wrote code to send messages between them all.
However, you still needed accounts on each for it to work.

Source:

 _No service can talk to all services. This means in order to talk to contact
X, you must have an account on the same service as contact X, or on any
compatible service.

    
    
      If you have an account on AIM, ICQ, or MobileMe, you can chat with anybody who uses AIM, ICQ, MobileMe, or SMS.
    
    
      If you have an account on XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal, you can chat with anybody who uses XMPP ("Jabber"), Google Talk or LiveJournal.
    
      In the official clients, MSN users can chat with Yahoo! users but this is not yet supported by Adium.
    
    
    

Some XMPP ("Jabber") servers (mostly private ones) allow chats with
proprietary services such as AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! via a mechanism called "XMPP
transports"._

[https://adium.im/help/pgs/Accounts-
ListOfServices.html](https://adium.im/help/pgs/Accounts-ListOfServices.html)

~~~
herbst
I assume he was referring rather to Google and Facebook which both supported
XMPP at some point.

~~~
nl
That would be correct. Unfortunately the author appears to believe otherwise.
I quote: _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._

I think the context is pretty clear.

------
nichochar
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 :)

~~~
GFischer
In South America (and I guess Asia too), access to WhatsApp would be even
bigger - and it's Facebook owned...

------
joelrunyon
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.

~~~
kitcar
If your goal is to have ecstatically happy customers, you may want to begin
thinking about your customer service channels as wherever your customers want
to talk to you, versus where you want to talk to them.

I know its a lot of work / not possible for all businesses / makes running the
business more difficult, but hopefully minimizing unhappy customers should
result in sales growth which offsets the investment in customer service.

~~~
joelrunyon
That's true, but by directing people to where we CAN help them & track their
data / info, we're better able to do that.

It'd be great as an "optional" feature, but the fact that they enable it
automatically & grade you on that basis is a bit ridiculous.

~~~
awad
Would software that unified your owned channels vs their owned channels help
you here with data/info unification help you here?

------
herbst
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.

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.

------
smrtinsert
Hey make up some cool stuff with interesting ideas so we can change terms and
steal your entire business, thanks!

------
xena
So, what IRC has had for all its life?

