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Ask HN: Has anyone created a useful Facebook Bot?

5 points by palidanx ↗ HN
I'm just curious if anyone here has created a useful Facebook Bot for your organization or business? Right now, I am making one for my church to send out automated notifications for what is happening in the week. We have an app, but it turns out nobody really looks at it so hopefully the Facebook Bot would have greater engagement. Just curious how others are faring out there.

10 comments

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jarnix
Hello,

I will try a bot as a/this weekend project.

However my first chat with Poncho was not too great : http://imgur.com/S4iJsw3

palidanx
Interesting. I'm guessing some of these bots aren't built on natural language processing, but instead keyword parsing?
mod
Classic Poncho.

Some of that is hilarious.

ffumarola
This pretty much mirrors my experience.

I feel like they rushed their launch partners (or themselves if they're self built). I haven't tried to find any more bots because of how bad the poncho UX was.

asteadman
I had a genius idea for a Facebook bot: customer relationship management for lifestyle service companies (think hairdressers, photographers, even Realtors). These businesses don't want to use extra software, and the overhead of entering customer information into yet another website/app is too much. However, they are probably already on Facebook because that's where their customers are. If a bot could push them notifications about their customers, and be properly tied in to open graph, I think it would be revolutionary.

I'm not in the crm space, and i don't use Facebook, so I'm not going to build one. My two cents.

ljk
you'd run into the problem of building on top of fb's platform and they can kill it any second
vr3690
That's true for all bots though, isn't it?
Raed667
I have made a Facebook bot that gets you HN stories (TOP/SHOW/ASK). Facebook didn't accept it.
kinsman
Did they give you a reason as to why it was rejected?
Raed667
They said that the interaction's quality dosn't meet their requirements.