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TechCrunch on Messenger — Personalized news recommendations bot on Facebook Messenger
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@benln It's somewhat useful. The CNN app showed my stuff I couldn't really care much about whereas the TechCrunch one has personal recommendations (correct me if the CNN app does as well, if so I'm just not that into news that's not about technology :p ). I usually fall behind on my techcrunch readings but since the bot brings the content to me I don't feel like I'm missing much.
What's great about these bots is the install-ability of them — I just saw "TechCrunch on Messenger" and could get started using it without downloading anything. I'm not a fan of getting news delivered several times a day (too distracting), but it's great that the barrier to entry in terms of speed, data cost, and difficulty is so low with bots.
Cool to see more media outlets adopting messenger --- the cnn bot was cool - I'm sure this will be interesting. I don't know if it would be better than other channels but we'll see.
Reading an article is painful in this. The articles are not tailored for messenger. I like the Quartz app which has all the articles summarized and linked to the original article. This is a good start though!
I have TechCrunch's recommendation bot on both Telegram and Messenger. There are slight nuanced differences between the two bots because of platform limitations.
Telegram delivers the news as separate messages with simple links. On the other hand, Messenger uses a carousel card view. From my experience, Messenger's carousel card view is more suited to delivering in batches. In favor of Telegram, Telegram provides custom keyboards for navigation which I find much easier to use than having to guess what text commands are available on Messenger.
With all the hype surrounding Facebook's new in-Messenger bots, I decided to give TC bot a try. It was horrible. I don't think it was even NLP, I think it was just basic positional parsing. Worse, I tried unsubscribing by chatting "Unsubscribe", and it replied with "Unsubscribed from." [sic] but still kept sending me chats every morning. Would use a lot of improvement still.
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