Manifesto of future changes through the prism of the market

Hello! There is an incredible excitement around the messengers. If earlier that bots were becoming the main technological trend, they were vaguely heard, now the headlines of the largest technological media are full of this. But as before, many people treat this trend with a certain degree of skepticism, and I dare to try to prove why bots and the conversational interface in particular will become a revolution.

Formation and conjuncture

As former product manager of Google Hangouts Ben Eidelson said: “Messaging is a form factor, a whole paradigm, and most importantly, a set of user expectations applied in different markets, scenarios and approaches.”
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The main advantage of instant messaging services is that any communication is asynchronous by default and synchronous if necessary. Messengers symbolizes the history of relationships between people. Message processing takes place in the context of long-term dialogs, where the topics discussed vary throughout the conversation. For comparison, old SMS clients did not know how to combine messages from the same sender, and in e-mail dialogs are formed around a specific topic.

Over the past few years, the message format itself has evolved greatly. There is a transition from textual forms of communication to multimedia. Users are increasingly sending different photos, videos, voice messages, stickers and more.

The basis of modern communication is the transfer of emotions, not data. This statement is evidenced by the immense popularity of smiles and stickers. They took on the function of "body language", expressing complex emotions in one picture. Smiles and stickers in a certain sense are a universal language of communication. Regardless of their nationality, everyone with their help can share their thoughts and feelings.


Source - Business Insider

The combination of all these properties and expectations allowed the messengers to become the main medium for communication. Instant messages demonstrate the highest level of user engagement compared to all other applications in other categories. Their greater popularity compared to social networks is due to two factors:

• Social networks imply an element of self-identification, preserving personal electronic heritage. Information in messengers dissolves in time, which does not require a focus on self-expression. It has value today and only today .
• Increasingly, users prefer to share information only in a narrow circle of friends and relatives. As mentioned above, the main message embodied in the message carries an emotional component .

Hegemony in numbers

Source - QZ

Whatsapp
World leader among instant messengers. In early February, WhatsApp reached 1 billion active users . The opening of a full-fledged API, scheduled for mid-2016, is expected by thousands of developers.

Facebook messenger



900 million monthly users . At the recent F8 conference from Facebook, the social network announced the Messenger Platform . Experts call this event the most important in the technology industry since the advent of the App Store. By that time, there were only 6 million users in the apple ecosystem, but this didn’t prevent it from becoming a harbinger of a new mobile era. And the current Messenger user base exceeds the total number of iPhones ever sold.

WeChat
The leader in China with a MAU of 650 million . The messenger is a whole platform with video calls, news feeds, e-wallet, the feature "Favorites", similar to Evernote, games like Shazaam service, allowing you to search for music and even a mail client. Over 10 million official company accounts have been registered in WeChat, most of which have already learned how to turn human labor and bots into synergy.

Skype


300 million monthly users . March 30, 2016 at the annual Build conference from Microsoft, Skype Bot platform was announced, which will allow you to create text and video bots for the messenger. The Microsoft Bot Framework was also introduced to develop bots for Slack, Office 365, Skype, etc.

Line
Another Asian product that has conquered Japan, Thailand and Taiwan has 210 million monthly users. Line is also a whole platform for creating games and a marketplace for selling stickers, which only in the first year of its existence generated an amount of $ 75 million . Daily Line users send and receive more than 2 billion stickers.

Telegram
Active user base of over 100 million per month . 350 thousand new users replenish the service daily, and servers deliver about 15 billion messages — in December 2014, this figure reached 1 billion. Telegram managed to score 1 place in the App Store in more than 45 countries around the world. Bot Platform 2.0 has been updated this week. Forbes estimates that Telegram has about 100 thousand bots. One of the most popular among them is TinaBot with almost 3 million users.

Slack


Source - Business Insider

I can not fail to mention in this list Slack, which changes the principles of corporate communication. It is called the operating system . In Slack, 2.3 million users and each of them, on average, spends 10 hours a day logged into it. 700,000 paid accounts, 60,000 teams. The launch of the Slack App Directory was accompanied by the opening of a $ 80 million fund, the funds of which are intended to stimulate the development of integrations and bots for this platform.

Snapchat
Probably one of the most original instant messengers. With self-destructing messages and a focus on graphic content, Snapchat has conquered US teens. Its daily audience exceeds 100 million , which sends more than 700 million “snap” and watches more than 8 billion videos per day.

Other
Also, do not forget about the iMessage mobile messaging pioneer with hundreds of millions of users, Canadian Kik including all the best from WeChat, numerous QQ, Viber, KakaoTalk, Blackerry Messenger, Hangouts, ICQ and even Instagram with its Direct Messages. There is also SMS, instant messaging applications from social networks and a separate market segment - platforms like Voximplant , Smooch , Layer and Twilio IP Messaging , which allow you to embed an instant messenger in the application.

Era change

The golden age of mobile applications, which account for millions, has already ended. Most smartphone users download 0 new applications per day, because they already have the necessary set, most often consisting of several instant messengers and clients for social networks.



According to SimilarWeb , in the first three days after installation, the average application loses 77% of daily active users, and after three months the user retention rate drops to 9%. Similar figures are confirmed by a study from Statista, but a sample of just messengers demonstrates a completely different user retention rate:


Source - Statista

With a high level of involvement and a huge audience, which is more than 3 billion people in mimic calculations, messengers have become a full-fledged platform. And on this platform, a new stage of technological evolution is being revived - bots.

Bots become competitors for other mobile applications. They help to learn news, exchange rates, a book, music, book a hotel, order goods, translate a word and even find a pair. Does the current situation not remind you of 2008? And 1995? Only today chat is a browser, and the bot site and the benefits of this phenomenon are obvious to both business and users.

Each company encourages the client to install a separate application, but it is likely that the user will use it once. Despite this, he needs to perform a number of actions: go to the app store, find it, enter the password, wait for the download, create an account. Bots have a different level of interactivity and open up the possibility of instant interaction with the outside world.

Bots are a priori a cross-platform product, the design of which consists in the selection of the correct words. In this regard, their development is much cheaper and easier in relation to mobile applications, which, in addition to being present on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, require strict compliance with the style guides for each of the platforms.

Any revolutionary technology is distinguished by the fact that it expands horizons and opens up new opportunities for humans. The advent of personal computers marked the coming of the century of information, the Internet has become the quintessence of all the knowledge of mankind, smartphones have opened access to this knowledge from anywhere in the world. What can bots give us? They allow you to receive any necessary information instantly. “It seems that all this is too simple to be called a revolution. That's the beauty of bots ”( Ted Livingston ). Bots - the beginning of the new Internet.

Many thanks to all for your attention.

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