Writing a Bot

Facebook recently announced and opened an API for building applications that can have conversations through Facebook Messenger.  This is a huge thing.  Messenger has 900,000 active users and it presents a huge business opportunity for new ways at interacting with people.

Many people are calling 2016 the year that conversational interfaces will take off, and a huge amount of capital investment is going into figuring out how to make txting with computer programs easier and more intuitive.

One of my old projects (which I still use) could really benefit from a message interface.  Persistence is a webapp I built to monitor my activities and nag me to maintain good habits.  One of the problems I have run into with it is that my email nag messages get filtered by gmail as not important enough for a push notification, and I miss them.

Chat provides a more direct messaging platform which doesn’t (yet?) have a way to filter things out, and thus would be more reliable at getting my attention.  It also offers a way to interact with the system without installing an app or visiting a webpage.  Perhaps I could just message back ‘go to sleep’ to silence things for a short period.

So I started to build it out, and it’s been pretty fun.