This week, Facebook knocked our socks off at F8, their annual developer conference. If you haven’t yet seen their augmented reality announcements, you’ve absolutely got to see them! Our team at the conference was absolutely floored and many of our customers and partners in the crowd left equally impressed and excited about the future ahead!

In addition to the awesome new AR platform, huge leaps forward on AI and their sci-fi brain/computer interface, we were happy to see David Marcus announce several new Messenger features as part of Messenger Platform 2.0.

New to Messenger Platform 2.0

Discover, a new way for users to discover bots and businesses in Facebook Messenger, is certainly the biggest piece of 2.0. It was also the most requested feature from bot makers since having a discovery engine on the platform will certainly help get more visibility for your bot or business.

Chat Extensions was also announced and looks like a promising new way to create experiences on the Messenger platform. Having a presence for your bot in the composer and the ability for users to share content inside conversations will help you drive usage as well.

In term of API changes, Messenger Platform 2.0 is relatively lightweight, despite the major version bump. Here are some of the new features and enhancements we’ll be bringing to the Smooch API.

Smooch updates coming early May

With the addition of Parametric Scannable Messenger Codes, we’ll be updating our webhooks to include the referral data that you’ll be embedding in those scannable codes.

We’ll also be augmenting our user profile API to include ad attribution information that Facebook Messenger is now making available.

What next?

We’ll be starting development of these features in the next few days. We also have other platform announcements in the making, but aren’t quite ready to share those yet. Look out for these new features and more in our changelog or follow us on Twitter to get our latest updates.