In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Chris Messina, bot evangelist, creator of the hashtag, and, until recently, developer experience lead at Uber. We talk about the origins of MessinaBot, ruminate on the need for bots that truly exploit their medium rather than imitating older apps, and take a look at what’s ahead for bots in 2017.

Chris Messina on Conversational Commerce

Inventor of the hashtag. #1 Product Hunter. Techmeme Ride Home podcaster. Ever-curious product designer and technologist. Previously: Google, Uber, Republic, YC W'18.

Innovation Insurgent. Parallel Entrepreneur. Maverick-Innovator. Puzzle Builder. Generalist. Advisor. @Disney Fanatic. Film Producer. - #IfItIsntBrokeBreakIt

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Chris Messina on Conversational Commerce

O'Reilly Radar