I have noticed greater visibility of Events and Live Video streaming. When a friend starts a live stream, I get a notification that shows up on my lock screen.
I'd put my money on Facebook going into video in a big way. Maybe they will be the one streaming sports games around the world.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-beats-facebook-amazon...
I'm seeing more an more articles about them. Amazon (via Echo/Alexa), Microsoft (via bot framework), and Facebook all seem to think it's about to become big, and I saw an article about China's mobile experience that suggested it's already pretty big over there.
Developers seem to be less interested in it, but businesses seem to be pretty hot on it.
You better have completed your "liquidity event" before that happens.
Big companies aren't in the habit of leaving virgin territory where new startups can take root, and every startup needs users.
The startups that succeed are the ones who make their userbase passionate enough to resist the initial competition from the big company who they're sharecropping on, long enough to build footholds on other competing platforms that'll give them leverage.
Paypal had independent access to markets. It just grew fastest via eBay because it solved a problem that eBay initially could not.
Clone PC makers had independent BIOS and MS-DOS so IBM could not snuff them. It finally lost when it tried to move PC users to the PS/2 platform and customers would not follow.
Microsoft negotiated and blocked exclusive licensing and control by IBM of MS-DOS before the first IBM PC shipped.
So yes, you can succeed if you have a way out of the inherent trap of being just another sharecropper. And to do that you better have negotiated a much better deal where you have options that cannot be easily blocked that are not being offered to everyone else. But you cannot expect to win much if you accept the publicly offered terms.
Facebook's terms of use for their platform allow them to cut you off from "your passionate users" at Facebook's whim.
I agree with what you're saying, but if you don't fool yourself into thinking you're safe, and you have a proper game plan (or simply don't invest too much!) you'll be fine. If you make money, sweet! If not, eh.
But I doubt AI will be good enough to do that, and I expect that I'll still have to think about fitting my words to the software's understanding. Why would these bots work better than Siri?
Maybe, but how could a company apart from FB monetise that?
This seems like a very risky opening for all but a few strong brands ("Get me an Uber to blah blah blah", etc) since they'll have no control over the platform and I imagine be quite difficult to remind users they exist. At least apps have icons to remind users they installed them.
ME: Hey have you guys watched Zootopia yet?
FRIEND 1: Nah I want to but didn't have the time. I'm free tonight if you want to go.
FRIEND 2: Yeah count me in too
ME: JEEVES find us a movie theater close to us that's playing Zootopia tonight.
JEEVES: There are 3 theaters close to all of you that's playing Zootopia tonight. Theater 1 at (map)Location 1 is playing it at 9PM, Theater 2 at (map)Location 2 is playing it at 8:30PM, Theater 3 at (map)Location 3 is playing it at 10:PM
ME: you guys wanna get dinner before the movie?
FRIEND 1: Sure
FRIEND 2: Nah having dinner with GF's parents today.
ME: JEEVES find us some chinese restaurants near Theater 3.
so on and so on.
JEEVES can then book tickets, make a reservation, put the event on calendars, send restaurant location to just the 2 people who agreed to have dinner, send reminder in the group chat, etc.
Heck, when I was working with a distributed startup we were using Skype group chat which was actually surprisingly good. Almost Slack good at times. The Skype API was powerful enough to build a bot, but clunky and nowhere as good as the APIs available today. I wrote eggdrop code decades ago and it was fragile and picky.
That's right, open architectures are like corporate tax laws!
Is it an unbiased-as-possible purchase agent working on your behalf, or it is a salesman on commission? Will it route you to the best option or the one that makes the most money for its owners? How do you know?
Currently the nearest thing I do to conversational commerce is Skyscanner and Digikey-style selective refinement.
At any given point in time Facebook favors certain integrations more than others. By not being a user you are more likely to waste time on integrations that are less useful than other ones. Before you design Facebook integrations you should become a user and observe these things.
Beyond being a user, unless you're also an active developer in the ecosystem I doubt you actually understand Facebook. There's lots of behind the scenes changes that you won't notice as a user but as someone who relies heavily on Facebook traffic, you will notice. So beyond becoming a user, you should also look at other successful companies and see how they handle integrations to get an idea of where the playing field currently stands.
So now they'll start live streaming it instead ?
