http://www.wired.com/2016/04/facebook-believes-messenger-will-anchor-post-app-internet/
This article discusses the possibility of the emergence of the post-app mobile internet, powered by Facebook's Messenger. According to this piece, David Marcus (the vice president of messaging at Facebook) believes that the internet is re-organizing itself again, and that bots will be driving the post-app world. He believes that this will be a much simpler interaction, since the bots on Messenger will be able to communicate about just about anything. Much like calling a 1-800 number, you'd be able to use them to book flights, order food, or communicate directly with any business, wherever it may be, eliminating the need for housing many separate apps on your phone and collapsing them all into one. He also says that the service will focus on making helpful ways for people to discover bots, so that it won't seem like a "scary change".
If Marcus wins over the developers on this idea, "Chat is the future of the Internet and Messenger is the future of Chat." I am curious what others think of this idea. Would you be more comfortable with one app housing all of your needs, your data (ideally) in one place, or does this give one app far too much control? After Microsoft's Tay debacle, how comfortable should we be with AI being such a large part of our interactions? Can you even fathom a post-app Internet?
The first thing this made me think of was how much more power it would give to Facebook, the already dominant social media platform, and how much farther this takes us from a democratic place.
Would you be interested to try the bot-based Internet in this form?
Interesting post Katie. I am not sure if I would give any corporation, much less Facebook, control over my personal data. This seems like another phase of the neoliberal project where, due to the lack of government intervention, private corporations are free to exploit consumers. However, given the subtle way in which social media (and even operating systems for that matter) initiate changes into their platforms, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up using a bot-based Internet without registering much of a protest.
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