[thieving_magpie]

Nice way to try and lock in more facebook users. If I ever encountered a business requiring Facebook for communication, that'd be the end of my patronage.

Facebook isn't doing a good job of masking their desire to force everyone onto their site (e.g. 'free internet' in India).

[njovin]

I've worked with the new Chat SDK and our customers' use cases aren't geared toward forcing (or even encouraging) users into using Facebook Messenger. Most of them are just trying to meet demand from their customers. In our particular case, we have customers with a lot of international travelers who have access to data while abroad but not necessarily SMS.

IMO it's a lot better than having a dedicated app you have to download to interact with a specific brand.

[thieving_magpie]

I agree that it's a nice option to have and I doubt many companies care to only provide one method of communication via Facebook. But there will be some, as there have been in the past that wouldn't let me register for their services since I didn't have facebook (Spotify at one point, another was a productivity app that was featured on HN).

It just seems like a slow creep by FB to become (as cliched as this is nowadays) 'too big to fail'.