Facebook Messenger Updates Review

As you may know, Facebook Messenger has released a new set of updates on November 8th, 2016. Facebook Messenger team has been working on eight updates and some of them are pretty interesting for both simple platform users and developers, especially chatbot creators. Let’s take a look at some of the updates in more detail.

The changelog has been updated with the following release features:

1. Support for Ref Param in m.me links.
2. New Checkbox Plugin
3. New List Template.
4. Tokenized Payments support.
5. Better Testing for Payments.
6. Added list of apps running a page.
7. Improved error reporting and clear subcodes.
8. Deprecation announcement: seq id field on inbound messages.

According to FB Messenger team m.me is a shortened URL used by Facebook that can redirect users to a person, page, or a chatbot in Messenger. This link can be used on your website, in newsletters, Facebook posts, etc. It works for both mobile and desktop. The format of the link is http://m.me/page_name, where page_name is the handle of the Facebook page your chatbot is linked to. For example, take a look at the screenshot below showcasing the Burberry bot link with the mentioned parameter:

“Talk to the Burberry chatbot on Messenger to uncover The Tale of Thomas Burberry. Follow us behind the scenes of our festive film, explore our new Gift Finder or start a Live Chat session. Go to Messenger and type ‘Get Started’ to begin: m.me/burberry 🎁”

M.me links can also be used to track different channels where links have been placed to. This will help you to see which of the channels is the most effective one. It can also be used to tie a Messenger user to a certain session or an account in an external app,direct the users to specific content or features available within the chatbot.

A new “Checkbox Plugin” is also a very exciting piece of functionality. It allows you to authenticate people with Messenger and start a thread. This plugin is somewhat similar to the “Send to Messenger” button, but it is more optimized for a commerce checkout flow, with the help of which users can receive purchase notifications via Messenger.

The Checkbox Plugin enables clients to integrate authentication into a user flow on their website. This checkbox fits naturally with the existing forms. When a person is logged into Facebook, this session will be detected and the person’s name and profile photo will be shown in the plugin. This will inform the user about the identity that will be used in communication with the business page.

A new List template is probably one of the most interesting updates. It has considerably widened the ways the content can be presented in chatbots. It looks really cute and user-friendly. At the same time it is very convenient for the clients and developers as it provides additional opportunities of the users’ engagement and onboarding in a chatbot.

The main purpose of the template is to present items vertically. The template itself can be rendered in two different ways. The first way renders the first item with a cover image with text overlaid. This makes the first item more prominent than the other items. The second way renders each item identically in a vertical list where no item is shown with more prominence.

Each item may have a button which can be used as a CTA with a URL that can be opened when a user taps one of the items. Each list template message can also have up to one major button which is shown below the item list.

Another feature to take a look at is tokenized payments. Tokenized payments is a great way to scale payment integrations in Messenger or your chatbot . This feature works as follows:

• an encrypted tokenized card is sent to your webhook once a user makes a payment;
• client can then charge the card with the payment provider chosen;
• public key needs to be set through thread setting for using tokenized payments.

One more update rolled out by Messenger team recently was better testing for payments as clients won’t have to be whitelisted to start testing any more. There are two ways to test the end to end flow without charging real money for developers at the moment.

You can test your payment on transaction level by specifying is_test_payment flag in the payment button payload. This currently only works for Buy Button. Once the flag is set to true, user’s credit card won’t be charged, but instead, FB will return a predefined dummy charge_id back. Is_test_payment flag can be set only for your app role users, like admin, developer or tester. You don’t need to be approved for beta payment permission to start testing.

If you are using Webview Extensions for payments, you will need to add your test users with the help of thread settings. Once the test users are added there, all payments made by them will be a dummy charge flagged as a test payment. This works for Buy Button integration only.

Finally, we should also take a deeper look at enhanced error reporting. When a Send API request fails, developers will receive a JSON response with the corresponding error code and message. From now on errors are grouped by code, with a different message depending on the error type and condition. For example, if you receive code 100 with the subcode 2018109 it means that attachment size exceeds allowable limit.

As you can conclude, Messenger updates are both user- and developer-oriented. Messenger team is moving ahead confidently and adds additional value to the chatbots abiding on the platform giving more space to develop and improve. I hope you enjoyed the review!