Facebook Messenger to make cash hooking users up with businesses

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Facebook is planning on carving out a fresh revenue stream via its Messenger app, with the introduction of an option to chat with businesses directly from within the service.

Business Insider (BI) spotted the move, with Facebook adding a section for 'Suggested Businesses' underneath the search bar where you can hunt out people and groups.

Messenger suggests some 20 companies that you might wish to talk with, including the likes of Lyft and Chase, although as BI notes, a lot of the businesses presented seem rather obscure right now (including the likes of small town US newspapers).

Obviously this is a feature which Facebook is still working on, and indeed this may just be an experimental rollout of the system to a small number of users which happened to include the reporter's account, with the social network testing the waters.

That idea is further reinforced by the fact that the companies highlighted for chat don't necessarily support chat features – when BI tried to chat with Lyft, the reply received simply indicated that the company didn't support chat.

Business boost

Of course all this will change in the future when the feature is fully rolled out (which it presumably will be), and it'll be extra cash for Facebook as doubtless the idea will be to charge organisations to be highlighted for chat.

Facebook is thinking more and more about businesses these days, and of course has Facebook at Work on the boil – the service hasn't officially launched yet, but should do very soon (it's already being tested quite widely).

Again, that will have a monetisation angle, with companies being charged for Facebook at Work premium services such as analytics and tech support.

For the employee, the service will be broadly the same as everyday Facebook, but with bolstered security – and of course you can forget about playing games like Candy Crush.

• Forget credit cards, Facebook Messenger might be the new way to pay

[b0rR*4cHo]

Facebook recently acquired WhatsApp as well which a bigger key to this puzzle.  This move is actually in reference to a decreased need in telephone numbers.  It is the future, only Facebooks executives are seeing 20 years into the future and staking their claim now.

Facebook is not the only company that is aware of this trend.  Most car manufactures are taking this into account and it is also the true reason as to why cars now come equipped with wireless capabilities.

 

Part of my coursework involves analyzing companies and determining their value (stock price).  Most of my colleagues are very interested in this concept to further explain this move.  Think of cell phone providers.  It used to be you had unlimited minutes and paid a premium on text messaging.  Then text messaging became the trend.  Then texting basically became free and it is now the data that gets charged a premium.  Now with this new concept that wireless capabilities will eliminate even the need for data.  So where is the future profitability of cell phone (communications) providers.  Soon they will no longer be able to command a premium for data.  But what is the next step.  What do you charge or how do you make money off people using their wireless connections.

 

Am asking this of anyone who is tech savvy and might have a clue.  If you figure this out you stand to make great profits.

 

Also to serve a warning, we extensively study facebook and they collect everything on you including recorded conversations.  You are a statistic to them and they make tons of money off selling your data.  I think in the summer of 2013 they also received criticism for conducting unethical social experiments where they began altering peoples profiles and post.  One thing that they did was take an individuals profile and on the feed they only showed friends of the person being on vacation.  By filling a persons feed with post of the friends having a ton of fun, this actually cause the individual to begin posting negative comments.  Plenty of Fish also got caught that same summer removing profile pictures to see if people matched faster without a photo, whether once a photo was displayed if the conversations continued.