The unique value proposition of bots is that they're embedded inside groups of people, as naturally as group chat. I think we'll be seeing more of this trend in the coming year.
Not that AliExpress is much better with counterfeit, but it is the "fresh" contender to the West. There might be a movement away from Amazon's core business as AliExpress / Ali* expand here.
Protocols are very important (R.I.P. XMPP). The article argues for bots to be the protocols that stitch the services back together, but we still need a standard for these bots to operate within...
The inability to monitor their whole network for scam advertising might cripple facebook's dominance as their main revenue source becomes less trusting but the scale of their operations relies on that consistent revenue:
Thanks for posting, our startup in Berlin is moving into the conversation-as-commerce space and this will help us with some design hurdles around user engagement.
This needs to happen in more scientific fields, like a field-specific consensus publishing platform. Everyone agrees to publish their research to benefit everyone else.
It's discouraging when new employees expect a certain lifestyle on joining your startup but you're runway is less than a year. Startups have been portrayed as having so many perks that there's an impossibly high standard to strive toward.
This is a depressing consequence of media-fueled racism/discrimination that will further drive the disintegration of the US as a strong competitor in STEM fields on the global stage.
