Facebook's Zuckerberg Outlines Shift to Messenger Bots, VR
by Sarah Frier
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg outlined a 10-year plan to alter the way people interact with each other and the brands that keep advertising dollars rolling at the world’s largest social network.
His vision, laid out in a speech on Tuesday at the company’s annual F8 developer conference at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, includes getting users to chat with artificially intelligent bots on Facebook’s Messenger to do everything from getting sports updates to ordering a car service. Further into the future, Zuckerberg sees people interacting with virtual representations of places and objects, accessible through digital applications, instead of purchasing the objects or traveling in real life.
“A lot of the things we think about as physical objects today, like a TV, will actually just be a $1 app in an app store,” Zuckerberg said at the conference, attended by more than 2,500 developers and partners.
The plan for all of Facebook’s products, from messaging to virtual reality, will require building an audience and then getting developers to build an ecosystem of businesses that communicate with that audience. He encouraged businesses to build bots for Messenger, which has more than 900 million users, saying that communicating directly with customers via the chat service will replace downloading individual apps on phones. Zuckerberg said 60 billion messages are sent daily via Facebook’s products, three times the volume of SMS text-messaging systems.
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