PubNub Announces New Open Graph Plugin for ChatEngine

The plugin allows developers to unfurl and enrich simple URLs into interactive rich objects in chat apps.

San Francisco, CA, September 24, 2018 -- PubNub, the company behind the world’s leading real-time Data Stream Network (DSN), today announced a Open Graph plugin for ChatEngine, enabling developers to turn simple URLs in chat messages into engaging, interactive rich objects. Rich objects should be a core component of any chat application. Common examples include displaying a news article headline and featured image, opening a YouTube player, or automatically playing a Giphy animation directly in a chat feed. Beyond improving user experience, rich objects have been proven both to increase chat user engagement, as users don’t have to leave the chat app to interact with the media; and to increase the click-through-rate to the linked media itself. The Open Graph plugin, which uses the OpenGraph.io service, joins the already robust catalog of pre-built chat plugins available with ChatEngine, including typing indicators, emojis, and unread message counts. Open Graph capabilities are now standard across the tech world, baked into pre-built website templates, all the way to the biggest media companies. This capability has now gone beyond static web and mobile web pages, and has made its way into the real-time app world - enriching messages and data in-motion. For instance, in eCommerce, brands are increasingly seeing the value of engagement in the message feed. Nordstrom dominated the holiday season with their new shopping assistant chatbot, which not only intelligently had conversations with customers, but was able to send them compelling product offerings without them ever having to leave the chat interface. And in 2016, Shopify launched their Facebook Messenger integration allowing customers to browse and buy products directly through a chat app, as well as tracking their shipment with live, interactive maps, all in a single thread. “We’re constantly focused on improving customer experience, engagement, and retention for our chat customers, and we’re delighted with the positive reception this plugin has garnered already. Rich objects create more interactive, immersive chat apps, where engagement truly happens directly in the chat feed. And because it’s ChatEngine, implementing the plugin is quick and easy,” said Johnathan Flowers, Senior Product & Integrated Marketing Manager at PubNub.