Facebook Messenger: 10,000+ developers working Chatbots, already has 2500 merchants through Shopify

Facebook Messenger Head Stan Chudnovsky said tens of thousands of developers working on developing rich interactive people to business communication chatbots at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY event. Chudnovsky is frequently dropped the word “startup”, because as far as his division in the company is concerned, it is still behaving like a startup. Chatbot technology is incipient, and that means that Facebook is still figuring out exactly where to take it. In fact, Chudnovsky says this is the reason they launched the platform, even though they had only a few basic apps to showcase at the launch. Chudnovsky compared the Messenger service to the early apps on the iOS platform, with apps for making burping noises and lightsabre sounds. The apps got much more serious as developers began to dive in and discover the possibility of the system. Facebook is actively gathering quantitative and qualitative feedback to improve the service. Chudnovsky revealed that the early signs point to a thriving platform. There are already more than ten thousand developers working for it, and it supports 2500 merchants through Shopify. On the basis of the feedback, Messenger is contemplating replacing the block button with a manage button, which gives users more granular control of how to handle alerts and notifications. Instead of outright blocking badly timed alerts, or a series of spammy pings, Facebook Messenger wants to give people the option to choose when to respond to these alerts. Chudnovsky also talked about the possibility of clumping together a series of notifications from one source. The focus of the Chatbots platform is to improve humans to business communications. This means giving developers more tools to help them make richer experiences for their users. This seems to indicate that chatbot analytics might be in the offing.