Uber got it, now MG gets it. https://500ish.com/k-i-get-uber-14a349f953cb#.qdm8p5tb3
He calls the UX “magical”
LOL @ “who needs apps?”
The other day I was talking about how messaging as interfaces would cannibalise the app ecosystem, and someone was insisting it would take 20 years. We dey observe.
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MG Siegler has always been an intellectual lightweight.
What’s to celebrate in platforms that allow third party tools to parse conversations, understand it, and perform some action which in this case is something as perfunctory as giving me a shortcut to an app. It’s not far fetched to see how it can be abused easily. Insider trading and repression of social activism are two things that come easily to mind.
I thought the whole idea for chat bots was to enable new interactions directly with AI, kinda like Siri, and not this AI operating under the hood like some eavesdropping pseudo butler service.
“Magical” is building the hyperloop transportation system, or controlling robots on Mars from a room on Earth, not this bullshit.
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A General Partner at one of the foremost Venture Capital firms in the World “an intellectual lightweight”? WOW! Techcabal Radar is a tough place!
First, there was context recognition then there was the flow which he indicated was NOT the same as the app, hence NOT a shortcut to the app. Then there were the notifications which enhanced the experience. Ultimately, technology is about change. This change of interface is a welcome one and MG gushing about it does not reduce its value but enhances it. I am sure a lot of people outside Radar consider his opinion to carry some “weight”.
Personally, I think this is the beginning of a lot to come. Uber has always been at the forefront of these things. Uber doing this with Facebook is major validation for this type of interface for e-commerce.
It ALWAYS gets better.
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I think this a great and innovative way to do business. It basically is the future and to think that it is better to use the messenger app as opposed to uber’s main app to get a taxi is just so surreal. I wonder how the guys at balogunmarket.ng can put this to use.
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“Right now we’re chatting in apps, but have to go to other apps to fulfill the actions being talked about. That not only doesn’t make sense, it’s quite laborious.”
He is being a little dramatic. I don’t know how many messages facebook messenger processes daily and if it’s the go to app for daily communication. For this conversational commerce to really take off worldwide, it has to be implemented on whatsapp.
My first direct relationship with Siegler was almost 10 years ago back in the early days of parislemon. He was just another tech blogger back then before he went to Techcrunch where he continued his craft. That he is in GV now is akin to Linda Ikeji being a judge at the next Pop Idol Nigeria. Some things are superficial at best. A Mark Andreesen or Peter Thiel he is not.
That he wrote that piece gushing like an infatuated 16 year old girl meeting Justin Bieber, without any balanced assessment of the significant privacy concerns is a huge disservice that only a populist blogger at heart would do. GV itself is no Sequioa so apart from the G in their name, I don’t see what makes them any special than all the other follower VCs with commodity money.
With respect, i beg to differ. Technology is about advancement. Allowing third parties to listen into your conversations, cataloguing and mining it without your knowledge, something that humans have developed natural ways to guard against for over 5000 years, is my brother, not advancement. The enabling technology is advancement but this type of use is not natural and is a step backward. The standard for what is advancement has really fallen fast, and if we shouldn’t take what people like Siegler feed to us hook and sinker without critical assessment.
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I think the word we are all looking for here is “perspective”
I think all i can say from my perspective is Conversation commerce or conversation apps, or bot e.t.c wouldn’t kill the traditional app system. Because really we all need apps, and nothing is going to kill apps.
If you take a keen look at the top apps which includes Snapchat, Musically, Whatsapp, Instagram, Tinder, Uber; no conversational bullshit can work for none of them except for “Uber” because really the entire system around the company is service. And for service, it’s really what works.
No one here would appreciate a context where your supposed feeds on Instagram is shared with you on messenger, because really, that would be bullocks.
Conversational commerce or whatever you call is sounds really fancy, but it would come and go just like everything else.
Apps, are here to stay.
Remember: “perspective”; that’s the way i see it.
You are one of the radarians that say it like it is…
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I replied to the wrong people earlier. The clunky UX of Radar should actually make my case below.
Lets take a step back from bias against MG Siegler to look at this dispassionately based on your grievance stated against the “technology” itself.
Privacy.
People have been listening in on people’s conversations for years and made Billions out of it. Gmail is a Google product that was monetized doing just exactly that. Have we ever as users taken time to read the terms and conditions of these tools we use? I think it is a choice you make. If you want real privacy, you will not be using ad powered platforms. You basically “opt-in” when you do. I don’t think Facebook and Uber are that stupid.
Technology and Change
Not ALL change has to be zero to one. Some can be incremental. This use case shows how powerful the technologies behind Natural Entity Recognition (NER) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have become, with practical applications. Applications and use cases may vary. I would instead be curious about those use cases than being dismissive. We may have wished for flying cars and got 140 characters, but those 140 characters are bringing down regimes. Sometimes the greatest changes are subtle.
I agree critical assessment and rigor is important, I also believe the power of technology needs to be acknowledged and new use cases that enhance human experience sought. I am more pro-Design and UX than anything else. To me, this is a quantum leap in UX using the most mundane - text messages.
What MG and I are gushing about is “the flow”, the “experience”. Same reason why we are both unapologetic Apple Fanboys. As Emeka Okoye puts it - “We are now in the conversational UX era.”
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Don’t get me wrong . I’m a big fan of NLP and I too have gushed and been super excited over the improvements in the art over the last 20 years (both for speech and the written form). The day a bot passes the Turing test will be a crowning moment in Computer Science.
but…
I am a strong believer in opting in to these services. Not the Facebook style “default opt-in” but an explicit opt-in like Siri or Amazon Echo where I have a conversation with the AI bot. Treat a bot like a human. If I want to talk to you, I’ll open a channel and talk to you but you can’t “listen in” and “record everything” without permission. Imagine if you may, a bot that has already passed or is very close to passing the Turing test, listening to your conversation, making decisions, which may or may not be in your self-interest, feeding it to insurance companies, employers, competitors. Companies such as Hacking Team will love this new world order where eavesdropping is encouraged in the name of UX. If human nature over the last millenia has taught us anything, it is that fascism is a natural human tendency. Buyer Beware.
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Apart from the fact GV is also an Uber investor. I think finding anyone from Google’s camp supporting _invasion of privacy because of commercializatio_n, is like realising an armed robber will likely support shoplifters. It’s only to be expected.
For instance, if you also look at the May’s release of Google Keyboard for IOS (never mind plans for Android), then you will realise what plans Google has for inserting itself into our conversations is no small fry, compared to Uber listening/searching for the word/text ‘uber’ in messages. Ability to read everything, everywhere of course for our benefit is no small feat. So MG is understandably happy about tech that even he admits it’s not new.
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Honestly, the blurry line between Privacy and Commercialization is getting scary, who knows when a hacker then creates a backdoor to this apps n listens to everything u type or do at home and trust me its coming we might change perspective, there are practical uses for the bots but i agree with you, i must first opt-in to such service not let it be a default.