Nearly a year ago today, I wrote a post inventorying the forebears to what I believe has become the dominant trend of consumer computing apps in 2016, a trend that I dubbed Conversational Commerce and have tracked with the hashtag #ConvComm.

This trend best came to life in 2015 with Uber’s integration into Facebook Messenger:

And now we have data from Business Insider showing that messaging apps have eclipsed social networks in monthly actives:

And yesterday, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) took the unanticipated (but easily expected) step of removing its $1 annual fee to go completely free in anticipation of a conversational commerce future:

Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today — through text messages and phone calls — so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.

The tech press seemed to grok the significance of this move (considering their coverage) in spite of historically underrating WhatsApp, even with its ~900M users.

On the very same day, sam lessin posted his thoughts about the winners and losers in the coming “bot” market, concluding that conversational experiences represent “…a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development in the valley, again.”

I agree, and so that’s why I’m ready to call it: