The Only Promising Part of Amazon's Rumored Messaging Service

Reports surfaced a few days ago that e-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is working on a new messaging service called Anytime. I'm generally pretty skeptical about the idea, mostly because the consumer market for messaging apps and services is already overcrowded, and it's hard to envision Amazon bringing anything new or differentiated to the table in terms of voice/video calling, group messaging, photo/video filters, or any of the other relatively standard features that are essentially table stakes for messaging services in 2017.

That being said, there is one feature that has some potential: chatting with businesses.

Connecting consumers with businesses is a core aspect of Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) Messenger monetization strategy, one that it has been articulating for a couple of years now. The idea, which was likely spawned from the growing trend of leveraging social media as a customer service platform, is to help businesses automate and scale customer service interactions in part by utilizing chatbots, with the businesses footing the bill. Currently, Facebook is trying to "build the behavior" of consumers reaching out to businesses on a messaging platform, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which is still a fairly new concept for most people.

Source: Fool.com