Facebook has updated its Messenger platform once again, now sitting at version 1.2. The update brings a number of great new features to the Messenger platform.
For example, Messenger can now be used to instantly make purchases using bots — in other words, using the credit card information stored in Facebook, you can now pay bots for services instead of only being able to use bots to initiate orders and not complete them.
“Customers can check out with a few easy clicks, without ever leaving the Messenger app,” said Facebook in a blog post. “Merchants will be able to onboard with a simple self-serve onboarding flow.”
To support credit card payments, Facebook says that it’s working with a number of major payment and credit card companies, including the likes of Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Visa, American Express, and MasterCard.
According to Facebook’s head of Messenger, David Marcus, who recently spoke to TechCrunch, a hefty 34,000 developers have joined the Messenger platform and have built 30,000 bots since the program first launched in April. That’s up from 10,000 developers in May and 11,000 in July.
Facebook’s commitment to bots has been growing, too — the company also announced today that News Feed ads can now point to bots and users can share bots with their friends. Not only that, but instead of bot interactions only being able to happen through text, web views can be used, too — ultimately allowing you to experience different types of media and even play some games within Messenger.
The changes are all in an effort to bring the Messenger platform more in line with what was expected from it at launch. Messenger wasn’t bad when it was relaunched as a platform — just a little underdone. That’s largely because developers didn’t have much time to build their bots before the platform went live. Now, however, there are bots aplenty and the features on Messenger to support them.
