The social networking giant may not be ready to deal with the flood of bots submission, according to publisher developers
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that, according to him, the solution to the overburdened apps is “chatbots,”then it seemed that the newly announced technology will be the next big thing however the situation isn’t nearly as expected.
Last month, the product was launched by the social networking giant through its Messenger app which gave it a considerate boost. The product was released through the partnership of the giants including Poncho –a weather service, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. Subsequently, the launch triggered others –who had initially not taken part in the initial rollout –and they announced of integrating the technology in their businesses to interact with their users.
However, after the initial excitement, the new technology is now at a standstill. The list of bots hasn’t had any expansion except the handfuls of brands and publishers that were earlier available at launch. According to several publisher developers, the reason for this lack of expansion in the bot list is the inability of Facebook to prepare for the bombardment of bot submissions. One of the developers on the basis of anonymity cited, “Facebook isn’t quite ready to accept all the submissions and approve them.”
Also, the Menlo Park, Calif. firm hasn’t carried out much promotion for the latest technology ahead of the F8 announcement. Their visibility is limited to quite a handful of the people. CEO of Betaworks –developers of Poncho –John Borthwick, relating to the promotion of the bots said, “Facebook is just starting to figure out how to roll it out and promote it.”
The development of the bots is not a big issue as according to one of the officials of NBC News, the company was able to build a basic bot in mere four days. However, the lack of resources can be a restraint. Also, building bots can add up confliction to the company’s other priorities including video.
Founder of Bustle, Bryan Goldberg has said: “[A Messenger bot] sounds like something fun with which to experiment –but it will not immediately change our core focus at the moment. Facebook Live is a massive initiative that is going to require substantial resources and focus on the part of digital publishers. Such media companies would be wise to focus almost entirely on their core publishing operations and Facebook Live. Other initiatives are not distractions by any means, but focus can only divide itself so many ways.”
Having said that, there have been several other developers who see great potential in being among the few people to integrate the technology and they look forward to making the most of it. Bot is fairly good platform for the publishers as the content shared on the bot can easily be linked to the publishers’ parent site. It is quite contrary to the limitation which the content is exposed to in closed systems such as Snapchat and Facebook Instant Articles.
The technology still is in phase of infancy and a lot of time is needed to come up with proper results and see how the financial of the company is affected. As of now, at the market which closed on Wednesday, Facebook Inc.’s stock stood at a price of $118.06.
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