Social media is nowadays far from being a simple virtual platform that facilitates human interaction, photo, information and personal experience exchanges. It is all of the above and much more. It is an advertising platform, a PR channel, a strong support for publishers, money exchange resource and from now on, your personal assistant.
A new report states that Facebook is now working on a personal assistant service called Moneypenny. We are already familiar with the concept, as Apple already delivered Siri and Microsoft has been doing a great job with Cortana. Well, Facebook has nothing to do with all the above, because Moneypenny won’t be a virtual helper but a real human service at the other end.
The new feature will allow users “to ask real people for help researching and ordering products and services, among other tasks”. The service is currently tested by the Facebook employees and hopefully soon it will see the light of day.
Offering a human dimension to personal assistance services is something new in the virtual world of social interaction. Apart from the official announcement that makes us wonder how the future of Facebook will feel like, additional information is yet unknown. We can only speculate and guess that the new service will take the shape of a personal concierge system rather than a robotic assistant ready to take our commands at any given time.
From official sources we know that Facebook will offer the service on all well-known smartphone platforms and all major Web platforms. No fee was mentioned by now, so the service could be launched on a cost-free basis. Moneypenny could be designed to actually pay for itself, in motivating Messenger adoption and enhancing the social media giant’s access to consumer data.
After the previous launch of the person-to-person money transfer service, a personal assistant could be the next natural step towards expanding the list of services beyond the entertaining, promotion and sales boundaries. Facebook is slowly rolling out an extended, complex and sophisticated range of features, in an attempt to retain, expand and motivate their users database to completely adhere and never leave the social media giant.
One piece of Facebook personal assistance here, a person-to-person money transfer there, one advertising service a click away, a pinch of marketing to the left, content sharing to the right, Facebook everywhere.
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