Over the years, Facebook Messenger has evolved from a piece of the social network into a standalone commercial platform. This of course is a result of how the company has been pushing Messenger over the past few years (including forcing Facebook users to download the app to read messages). Last year, it was pretty much at the centre of Facebook F8 conference and wasn’t much outside the frame this year as well.

Over the past year or so, the focus has been not only to evolve Messenger as a social tool but also as a tool useful for businesses. Last year FB opened up the Messenger platform to allow chat bots into the app and many travel brands quickly jumped in with their ideas. Along with this, a Bot Engine was also announced to make those chat bots more useful. This year, Facebook is moving up to its Messenger Platform 2.0.

With the new platform, Facebook turns its focus on improving discovery. With the increasing number of chat bots on Messenger, Facebook is looking to put the right kind of bots in front of right kind of people. This will start with a new Discover tab which will list relevant bots. Taking another step in the same direction, Facebook is revising Messenger Codes. They are now easier to use and businesses can place them anywhere so that more users engage with their bot.

Adding a feature that would remind you of Allo, bots can now be accessed in conversations between people. Kayak and Uber are already jumping on this development to explore the feature. They have also introduced Smart Replies, an improved version of auto respond, to offer some useful information instead of a single preset message.

Facebook clearly wants to see Messenger in more places than it is right now. As more businesses and users find value in Messenger, it will also open up a potential advertising channel for Facebook.

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With lot of expectations, we have been eagerly waiting for the Facebook F8 Developer conference. Facebook has been experimenting with a lot of things lately like 360 degree videos, new ways to consume media, virtual reality, messenger bots and live videos. It was expected that during the conference, Facebook will offer lot more tools for brands, in travel and otherwise, and they didn’t disappoint. The Day 1 turned out to be promising and here is what new they have got for travel brands and marketers:

Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, Facebook

More ‘Live’ for you

Facebook recently introduced the option of live video and soon after, the notification tab was full of ‘XYZ is live’ notifications. Now they are going a step further and opening up more possibilities for the fans of live videos. It will be introducing APIs that would allow for the feature to be coupled with different cameras.

Periscope gave live videos an initial push but being limited to mobile, quality was a challenge. Travel brands like Skyscanner were bold enough to come up with ideas like 24 hour Periscope but not without the issues associated with mobile camera and internet. With Facebook however, brands will be able to use much better equipment and in turn produce better results.

Better visibility for travel media

Publishers widely use Facebook to share their content and for most them, a significant fraction of readers come from the social platform. However with a wide variety of devices and browsers, standardising the experience is a challenge. Facebook and Twitter introduced in app browsers but they didn’t solve the purpose either. With instant articles, travel publications and bloggers can manage to offer better experience to the readers coming to read their travel tales. Instant articles don’t require any third party app, launch very quickly and are perfectly optimised for the mobile device. The feature was already available to selected publishers and now all the publishers will be able to use it.

Say it with AI

This was probably the most talked about ‘secret’ announcement that Facebook had for the F8. Facebook announced that it will open up the Messenger platform in beta to allow chat bots into the app. This would enable travel brands to put an AI powered chat representative on the front to deal with the customer in Messenger app. Along with that, it also announced Bot Engine, a tool for teaching chat bots on what to say in different situations. With chat emerging as a popular option among travel brands to provide customer service and even bookings, the option of bots will speed up the process and open up a new channel.

A Google Jump rival

Over the past few months, we have been introduced to some very interesting startups like Ascape that are focussing on virtual reality travel experiences. However the common denominator has been the challenges in creating the content. Google introduced the Jump project earlier to make the job easier for content creators and now Facebook has introduced the Surround 360. It looks like a flying saucer and has 17 cameras to record the perfect 360 degree videos. Facebook also claims that it will minimise the post processing job and produce an almost ready to share result. Just like Google Jump, it is open source so hardware hackers can create their own variations.

We are looking forward to the announcements on the second day and will keep updating you on the same.

The post All you need to know from the first day of Facebook F8 Developers conference appeared first on TravHQ.

Bots have the potential to bring the next big transition in mobile technology and might significantly affect the ecosystem of mobile apps. Mobile devices are getting flooded with apps and people are spending most of their time between only a handful of apps. Messengers and social networking apps take a larger fraction of that time and thanks to the recent developments, bots are being integrated into these communication channels. The progress in natural language processing has also helped significantly.

It is widely rumoured that at the upcoming F8, Facebook will open up its messenger app to third party developers and offer a bot store. However just a few days from the big announcement, Kik, a popular chat messenger, has introduced its own bot store. At this point, Slack seems to be the only major platform that features a wide array of bots and is a widely popular team chat tool. Kik on the other hand has younger users and according to the company, approximately 70 percent of its users sit between 13 and 24 years of age.

This isn’t the first time Kik is experimenting with bots and we have seen them offer bots to serve up content for brands in the past. Now they have launched a full-fledged bot store with 16 bots. At this point, we don’t see any travel or e-commerce brands on the list but it might change soon. Considering the fact that most of the users of Kik are young, travel brands like Airbnb that are popular among young travellers can make the most of the feature.

Along with the bot store, Kik is also offering tools to allow developers to easily develop their own app on https://dev.kik.com. The bots are pretty simple at this point but brands and developers might see potential in them and find a variety of uses. The direction of where this segment is headed isn’t very clear at this point and will take a while to take shape similar to what we saw with apps. One clear advantage bots have over apps is that they can keep sitting in the chat list of user and he or she won’t feel the need to remove an unused one like in the case of an app.

Whether or not this will help the instant messaging app gain traction with different users is yet to be seen. The competition will increase to a serious level if and when Facebook introduces its bot store and it is up to the developers on how they use different bots on different platforms.

Read the announcement on Kik blog here.

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