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Gary Edwards

Dan Grover | Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps. - 0 views

dangrover.com/...bots-wont-replace-apps.html

Messaging Notification WeChat

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The key wins for WeChat in the above interaction (compared to a native app) largely came from steamlining away app installation, login, payment, and notifications, optimizations having nothing to do with the conversational metaphor in its UI.
  • Indeed, the cornerstone of whole experience is effectively a common, semi-hierarchical stream of messages, notifications, and news with a consistent set of controls for handling them. It’s no stretch to see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric).
  • This term – “app” – is rather old, yet only entered common parlance with the proliferation of smartphones. This is no coincidence. The app paradigm introduced on smartphone OSes circa 2007 was a radical improvement over what we’d had on the desktop. For the first time, software was easy to install, even easier to delete, and was guaranteed to not totally screw with your system (due to sandboxing/permissions models).
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  • Though some apps indeed are mini-desktop apps that make full use of the supercomputer I carry in my pocket, well over half fall into another category. These apps are just a vessel for a steady stream of news, notifications, messages, and other timely info ultimately residing in a backend service somewhere. They don’t really do much on their own. It’s much like how a tortilla chip’s main value is not so much in its appeal as a chip but as a cheese and chili delivery mechanism.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16
     
    "A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION I don't know about you, but here's what I want to see happen. I want the first tab of my OS's home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app's inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I'll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I'll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos. The next time I'm back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday's4 and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight. As a user, I want my apps - whether they're native or web-based pseudo-apps - to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles. I don't actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these pr
Gary Edwards

Facebook Messenger: inside Mark Zuckerberg's app for everything (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...inside-facebook-messenger

Messaging Conversation Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to 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 Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.
  • "The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
  • Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account.
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  • Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app.
  • But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users 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…"
  • There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day."
  • Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger"enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."
  • People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries.
  • And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network.
  • "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? T
  • service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery
  • Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?" 
  • WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."
  • Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing.
  • So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"
  • Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles"
  • 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."
  • "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."
  • When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says.
  • "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach.
  • We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."
  • Julien Codorniou
  • Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan.
  • Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes.
  • Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."
  • "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation.
  • The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules.
  • Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform.
  • And yet… the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android,"
  • It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge.
  • "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting
  • We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    ""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," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does.""
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