09/12/2016
GetCont is a mass media aggregator bot for Facebook and Telegram.
Every major mass media nowadays wants to create its own channel or bot for instant messengers. Nobody really knows why they need it, but it’s kind of cool.
Time will show how relevant are these so-called media channels for IMs. We think that the messengers’ usability leaves much to be desired, so they are not as good as mobile apps. Except maybe for WeChat.
This is not our first project connected with web content aggregation, so after the launch of our bot platform in Facebook we decided to test it and see how it works. The results of our tests show that GetCont works better in Facebook than in Telegram.
GetCont is the only IM aggregator bot for all types of media. It can save content creation companies from the need to develop their own bots, thus simplifying the life of users who want to read several publications in one channel.
What can our Bot do? The media are divided by countries and categories. The navigation and feed search features are enabled in the Bot. You can add the feeds you like to favorites and open a simplified version of the articles right in the Bot thanks to the integration with Mercury service (former Readability).
We are not really satisfied with how Mercury “clears” the content, because it makes a lot of mistakes in feeds, which often leads to the loss of text or photos. But we have chosen to use a third-party script because this “simplified article” mode allows to open posts faster and to adapt content for viewing, which is particularly important for mobile users.
If we made our own script it would help to avoid those bugs and would allow to open posts almost immediately, but in order to save time we chose not to focus on this problem at the moment.
GeCont allows its users to comment on posts. You don’t have to register in order to make a comment. Public information is automatically taken from your messenger profile. If necessary, you can change it right in the bot. Comments are cross-platform, so everybody will see them, no matter if a comment was made by the Telegram or Facebook user.
The bot was created on its own platform based on yii2 framework. The bot core is installed in Microsoft Azure cloud.
Right now, the bot has been localized for three countries, including the USA, Russia, and Ukraine. We are planning to expand this list. We have developed localized versions for a few more countries and we may add them soon. If you don’t see your media in our catalog and would like to add it there, just contact us through GetCont bot in Facebook or Telegram and we will add your feed by ourselves at absolutely no cost!
If you have any comments or suggestions concerning the improvement of GetCont bot, please contact us. We are willing to work on it.
