Messenger Platform 2.0 Debuts at F8

Today at F8, we introduced Messenger Platform 2.0, a new suite of tools that gives you the ability to build richer experiences, get discovered, and extend the conversational, visual and social capabilities of your bots. With more than 1.2 billion monthly users and over 100,000 monthly active bots, we are focused on learning and building for our developers.

Messenger Platform now includes:

• Discover. We've created a new surface to help people intuitively browse and find the best bots, places and businesses in Messenger. Discover showcases popular bots in our ecosystem, nearby places that people can message, and businesses that offer support or answer questions. Discover also includes categories such as Entertainment, News, Food & Drink and many more. We encourage all bot developers to complete our Discover submission form today to ensure their details are up to date.

• Chat Extensions. This new feature allows people to contextually bring a bot into a conversation and collaborate on creating shopping lists, ordering food, splitting payments, sharing music and other new and existing use cases. Chat extensions make a bot's UI accessible via the composer, where people can then share it into a 1:1 or group conversation. TriviaBlast, Spotify, Swelly and many more already offer these experiences. Learn more.

• Parametric Messenger Codes. Messenger Codes are a great tool to drive offline-to-online traffic to bots. With parametric versions, businesses can now generate multiple Messenger Codes for their bot and see which ones are being scanned the most. Separate codes can also be used to activate different bot functionalities when each is scanned. For instance, hardware devices can feature parametric codes to allow people to link their account and control the device. Restaurants can assign tables using different codes, giving their bot a way to know where food should be delivered. Learn more.

• Hand-over Protocol. Businesses can now work with multiple developers to create different experiences within a single bot. With this hand-over protocol tool on our platform, various vendors and developers will be able to pass control back and forth based on the state of the conversation. For example, if you want to offer personal shopping services and customer support but each function is operated separately, everything (and everyone) can now work together in one bot. Note: This is currently available in limited release for select businesses. To learn more, contact your Facebook partner manager or representative.
• Connecting people across apps and Messenger bots. Today, bots in Messenger use Page-Scoped ID (PSID) and apps use App-Scoped ID (ASID), which creates two different IDs for the same person across your various communication channels. If you have an existing customer in Facebook and want to personalize your communication with them in Messenger, this API pairs the ASIDs and PSIDs between an app and a bot in Messenger belonging to the same business. Learn more.

For more details about Messenger Platform 2.0, view our latest changelog and documentation.