Facebook says 10K developers are building chatbots, analytics are coming

Despite gripes about the usefulness of Facebook chatbots, "tens of thousands" of developers are building them, Messenger's head of product Stan Chudnovsky revealed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. And, 5,000 Shopify merchants are now distributing order confirmations and shipping alerts via Messenger, showing e-commerce companies are eager to reach the app's nearly one billion users. These bots are getting pretty chatty. One of the more recent high-profile chatbots introduced on the Messenger platform, Activision's Call of Duty bot, saw engagement soar to nearly 6 million messaged exchanged between users in its first week of existence. The problem is that if bots get spammy, they could drown out people's friends in Messenger.