The Message is the Medium

PREFACE

Fresh off being featured at the World Economic Forums’ Live Blog @ DAVOS with my thoughts on The Fourth Age and Why “Resilience Imperative” is Imperative, I wanted to continue down the revolutionary road with some thoughts around what we can expect to see in the Fourth Age.

My next series of my thoughts will attempt to connect the dots amongst some of the trends & innovations — notably in mobile messaging — that will become more prevalent during the next decade.

That being said, the business & interaction models around these innovations are still in their infancy, so for the executives, politicians, designers, or pessimists reading this, I’ll steal your thunder right now by admitting some of these ideas may not appear to fit within the physical and mental constructs built within your industry, organization, or peer groups. That being said, I will challenge the naysayers to let their imagination loose and to think about this for a moment (inspired by The Matrix):

I’ve seen incumbents punch through geographical and industry borders, dominate consumer segments and product lines; competitors have emptied their war chests at them and hit nothing but air; Yet, an incumbent’s strength, speed, and agility are still based in a world that is built on rules.

Because of that, they will never be as strong, or as fast, as *you* can be.

INTRODUCTION

A great thinker of our modern time, Marshall McLuhan famously coined the term, “The Medium is the Message” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. For those of you not familiar with the saying, the idea encompasses the thought that the interaction medium alone, and not the actual content or message, affects the environment in which it plays a role.

We can go on for hours about what a medium is exactly — but my favourite explanation regarding how new mediums affect us was synthesized by Wilson Minor’s interpretation of McLuhan’s words:

When you introduce a new medium it changes our outlook, our attitude, and our feelings on how we relate to the world. Even in darkness, a light bulb can bring a environment of brightness, of warmth, of hope — of seeing something that was not seen before.

Fast forward 50 years: as we enter the Fourth Age of the Industrial Revolution, I believe we’re at a point in time where we’re seeing a new paradigm that brings McLuhan’s thinking to the forefront, while also playing on his infamous saying:

Not only is The Medium the Message, but now The Message is the Medium.

More specifically, mobile messaging will become the prevalent social & business interaction model in the coming fourth industrial revolution.

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHAT

Some may point to Blackberry’s BBM as the driver of mainstream mobile messaging — however I don’t believe the traditional pipe model really broke the experiential mould beyond evolving into a popular, secure mobile version of MSN Messenger for enterprise.

So what made it take off globally? Looking at the chart from Business Insider (modified for presentation), this was the trend for the top messaging apps vs social apps between 2011–2013:

Looks like messaging has a long way to go until it catches up to social, right? So what has happened since 2013?

It’s safe to say now — Messaging is Eating the World

So what’s been driving this astronomical growth? Aside from ‘Mobile Eating the World’ and Tencent in China (QQ Mobile & WeChat), two other significant events occurred over the past couple of years to bring mobile messaging as the medium — driven mostly by the Facebook effect:

Driver 1: Q1 2014: The WhatsApp Acquisition

At the time, the move had a few heads scratching, but as Mark Zuckerberg said in reference to WhatsApp’s soaring growth,

“No one in the history of the world has done anything like that.”

The wittiest argument supporting the acquisition was eloquently provided by Sequoia Capital with four simple numbers 450, 32, 1 and 0. My intuition tells me it was at this time that Mark (not sure if we’re on a first name basis yet), started conjuring up the future of messaging as a platform.

Driver 2: Q3 2014: Facebook Messenger Spreads Its Wings

Facebook makes a strategic move to decouple its messages module from the core Facebook application into a standalone product — Facebook Messenger. The rationale, as cited by Mark Zuckerberg himself:

“Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.”

The move paid off with Facebook recently hitting 800 MAU for the Messenger app.

With the strategic hiring of a payments & platform visionary (Q3–2014 David Marcus hiring), a successful playbook to follow (WeChat, already dominating platform, launched public services), and an immense user, developer, and content pool to grow the network effects exponentially (think beyond 3 commas), I think Mark had a bit more than just the regular pipe model in mind when the decoupling occurred.

PART 2: MESSAGING AS A PLATFORM (MaaP)

My first exposure to Messaging as a Platform (#MaaP) began in early 2014, when I was first exposed to WeChat — TenCent’s messaging service that runs through the fabric of society in China. Check out the beautiful growth of WeChat — like clockwork:

Connie Chan, from Andreessen Horowitz, does a fantastic job summarizing WeChat as The One App to Rule Them All. Aside from the obvious commerce, customer support, and payment mechanisms, WeChat’s city services enhancement empowers individuals in China to engage with a number of public services as well, such as:

• Book Doctor Appointments
• Report Incidents to the Police
• Hail a Cab
• View traffic feed cameras
• Paying hydro bills
• Paying traffic fines

Imagine a platform that touches so many aspects of your life that it becomes a part of your life. As discussed in the WeChat blog, the typical WeChat user’s day might look something like this:

Side thought: @ PM Trudeau & Honourable Minister Bains, imagine the economies of scale the government and public services in Canada can achieve by going down this road.

So with WeChat leading the way with the MaaP phenomenon and the planets in alignment (user base, engagement, and network effects in play), Mark showed us his plans for an app for everything and launched the Facebook Messenger Platform & Businesses on Messenger in Q1 2015. Around the same time, Evan Spiegel, the wunderkid founder of Snapchat, also launched SnapChat Discover, a platform for brands to create original snapchat content for their coveted user group.

The “thread wars” had begun — more & more messaging apps were going down the platform path.

Why were these important moves in world of messaging? Both Facebook and Snapchat, along with the other top messaging apps, had one side of the platform equation completely locked up — consumers. For example, Mark had close to 1.7 billion consumers (MAU) walking through his two-headed goliath every month and Evan had around 100 million (DAU) digital natives and millennials living in their daily moments. Along with host of other apps, messaging apps had just started laying the groundwork to turn consumers and producers into customers.

PART 3: PRODUCERS — MISSING IN THE MaaP EQUATION

The shift from a messaging app using a pipe model (e.g. BBM) vastly differs from a platform model (e.g. WeChat).

From our friends over at Platformed, I’ve attempted to distill the differences into this simple chart:

Notice the big difference between Pipe vs. Platforms — the emphasis is on BOTH producers and consumers in the platform world. For simplicity sake, we’ll consider two different types of producers for messaging:

• Conversational Content Producers: text (news, blogs, messages), music, video, images, stickers, ads — let’s call it #convcont
• Conversational Service Producers: commerce, transportation, payments, accommodations, concierge, etc #convserv

The early days of MaaP (in North America) has been dominated by #convcont. These are some examples of how #convcont has dominated the MaaP ecosystem (they’re also sad examples of all time I waste on messaging).

• GIF cameras/creators on Messenger
• The Discovery/Stories module on SnapChat
• Sharing a funny YouTube video to a WhatsApp group
• Sending silly stickers on Hangouts because you had nothing interesting to reply with

While still in its infancy, the future of MaaP (and possibly mobile) lies amongst #convserv, notably those services that already exist in the current form of a mobile app.

Let’s take a popular service app that most of us can all relate to, Uber, and see how it plays out as a service producer in a Facebook Messenger ecosystem.

No deeplinking, no redirects, no break in the user experience — neat, right?

This new paradigm leads me to the following ten questions/observations of going down this path (trust me there are a tonne more rattling around my head):

ECOSYSTEM

1. Does message threads become part of a new runtime on mobile — will apps be required at all anymore or just the service calls and snippets of content?

2. How does Apple & Google feel about their mobile platforms being taken over? Facebook already fears being cut out of Android

3. Does cross platform design become a thing of the past?? Adding functionality is as simple as adding a user to your chat — no longer a need to design for separate platforms.

DESIGN

4. Transition from ‘look & feel’ to ‘tap & feel’. How does force touch/haptic feedback play a role in this new design paradigm

5. Design will include new pillars such as personality, comprehension, accuracy

6. What are the new metrics that will be introduced within this environment (e.g. threads/day)? What is success/failure in this new world?

COMPETENCY

7. Will we move from design driven development, to algorithmic driven development?

8. Data Scientists, User Experience Designers, Psychologists, Linguists, and Behavioural Economists will be high in demand.

DISTRIBUTION

9. What happens to Search? App Store Distribution? Do we create service stores (Slack) or are services discovered inline (Facebook Messenger).

10. If two-way interaction is required, how do we scale? Humans or Bots?

PART IV: THE FOURTH AGE — CHAT BOTS & MOTHER BRAIN

The final questions above lead us head first into a potential shift in the workforce during the Fourth Age — the emerging trend of Chat Bots baked within MaaP has already begun to take off (thanks #Slack).

For those of you not familiar with intelligent Chat Bots, they are autonomous entities in the messaging universe that try to convince us that humans are obsolete — or more simply a computer you can chat with.

There are two popular methods to creating chatbots:

1. Build: Make your own using Artificial Markup Language (AIML), Facebook’s Chat API (if you’re lucky), or fork an existing bot (ALICE) and build on top of it.
2. Get a bot to do it for you — yes it’s brilliant. An emerging trend in the chat ecosystem, is to have a ‘giant spaghetti monster’ like bot help you create and customize a new bot to do your bidding. For the most part, these bots help you create a flowchart of logic to help your user navigate to a desirable outcome (think of a bunch of IFTTT scenarios)

So how can they impact our workforce? Think about your job, or personal interactions with businesses on a day to day basis:

• How complex is the interaction?
• Can you distill the activities into a series of if-else statements?
• Can the task be replaced with a nested survey? a switch? a loop?
• Can you predict, with a high level of probability, what the next step in a process is, given specific inputs?
• Does the interaction absolutely require a physical presence?
• Are there logical connections between content types: text, images, video, sounds?
• Are there logical connections between service types: travel + leisure, retail + payments, travel + transport?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I think you know the answer.

And developers have already started going down this path for consumers: Facebook recently launched Facebook M, its AI messaging bot on Facebook Messenger to help consumers with search, day-to-day tasks, and making everyday purchases (note there is still some human supervision/intervention with Facebook M).

I’m not claiming a Chat Bot will a displace your job or a large portion services/support workforce overnight — what I am merely doing is throwing light on a gray future. What I can say, without any hesitation, is that these tools do have the ability to free up a lot time that we spend on mundane activities and trivial decision making — Slack is already making a dent in replacing administrative tasks like expenses, & team meetings using bots. And maybe that’s the end game:

Chat Bots should help free up our time (in both our personal & professional lives) so we can focus on the stuff that really matters.

So how will these bots manifest themselves? Seeing where the messaging incumbents are taking them, the first wave of bots will be driven by:

1) NLP tagging+service call logic

2) Nested surveying

3) NN methods.

However, the really ingenious stuff starts happening when we see the blending of the consumer/producer relationship in the MaaP construct, that is when Bots start talking to other Bots and take over the threads for us. So for example if I wanted to book a vacation, I could merely instruct a Chat Bot to “Book me a 1-week trip to Davos for WEF in 2017.” Following a series of prompts to refine some constraints, that Chat Bot could move ahead and:

1. Order my tickets to WEF //msg to Event Bot
2. Book my flight // msg to Travel Agent Bot
3. Book a place to stay //msg to AirBnB Bot
4. Book an Uber ride from my location to the airport //msg to Uber Bot
5. Check me in to my flight //msg to Airline Bot
6. Modify my seat based on preferences //msg to to Airline Bot
7. Book an Uber from airport to my AirBnb // msg to Uber Bot

Where logic/constraints needs more refinement, the Chat Bot prompts the user to fill in the missing information. Furthermore, you could potentially view the entire thread unfold between the Bots for auditing purposes.

Bots talking to Bots would be an interesting way to re-engineer existing app constellations & super clusters.

As the thread wars move to a higher level of digital warfare (amongst AI & Bots), the #MotherBrain still has yet to reveal herself. And I’m going to call it now:

Google will create the mother brain of all Chat Bots.

The Google Chat Bot — #MotherBrain for the time being — will be the outcome of years of data collection, web/app indexing, machine learning, social engineering, natural language processing, and translation — the largest set of training data the world has ever seen. Aside from the rumour, the breadcrumbs for an ultimate Chat Bot in the mobile ecosystem has been around us for the last few years:

1. Search — seeks out what it can’t understand
2. App Indexing — knows where services, content, and data sit within apps
3. Weave — communicates with other things outside of your mobile device
4. Google Now — knows who you are and what you care about
5. Google Photos — understands and refine its understanding of the physical world
6. OK Google — knows natural language and how you speak
7. Translation — communicates across borders and languages seamlessly
8. Connected Car — helps you get to where you need to go
9. Calendar/Inbox — understand how you plan

..the list goes on. As I started to go down this thought process, it also struck me that:

If the Google Chat Bot is for day-to-day life, then the Facebook Chat Bot is for life.

Say what now? Well, let’s go through some of the training data Facebook has on its hands:

1. News Feed — information preferences and consumption habits
2. Likes — emotional connection to information
3. Friends — circles of trust
4. Sharing — how you connect to individuals + groups
5. Messenger — how you interact with individuals + friends

So if that’s the case, do we essentially live on forever through the fourth age an beyond? To answer that, I would like to recall a blog post from the brilliant people behind the blog Wait But Why, entitled What Makes You You — I think it would be a fitting way to stay within the gray at the conclusion of my arguments:

…what you are is not really a thing as much as a story, or a progression, or one particular theme of person. You’re a bit like a room with a bunch of things in it — some old, some new, some you’re aware of, some you aren’t — but the room is always changing, never exactly the same from week to week.

Likewise, you’re not a set of brain data, you’re a particular database whose contents are constantly changing, growing, and being updated. And you’re not a physical body of atoms, you’re a set of instructions on how to deal with and organize the atoms that bump into you.

EPILOGUE

During the coming year, MaaP & the Rise of the Machines, will further solidify messaging as “the killer application on mobile” — we’ll continue to see Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts, SnapChat, and WeChat dominate the global charts as well as iMessage, Line, Kik Messenger, Slack, and Telegram continue their stranglehold on key industries, demographics, and geographies. To further your comprehension of the impact of messaging on your everyday life today:

Open your phone, and look down at your home screen or notification tray — it’ll become evident pretty quickly why the Message is the new Medium.

-H10I

Hafiz Vellani

is the Founder of Main Entre Inc — a mobile advisory services firm. When he is not advising his clients, he’s thinking of ways our future will be impacted by emerging trends in the digital world — you can find him in the gray.

His latest thoughts, The Fourth Age and Why “Resilience Imperative” is Imperative, were recently featured on the World Economic Forum’s LIVE blog during DAVOS. Let him know your thoughts — hafiz@mainentre.com

NOTE: The brilliant, Chris Messina, recently wrote 2016 Will Be the Year of Conversational Commerce. I urge everyone to read it as well!