(2010-11-16) Facebook Messages E Mail

FaceBook has announced Facebook Messages, their EMail (and lots-other - Social Inbox/Universal Inbox) offering. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages... You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message... To be clear, Messages is not EMail. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to Live Chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

Charlene Li gives a big picture. The underlying assumption to Facebook Messages is that you have a real relationship with your Friends. I expect that Facebook will keep refining how messages are prioritized within the Friends inbox (for example with Friend Lists, recency of interactions), but it highlights the importance of being someone’s friend in the first place. Hmm, this gets at the inherent problem FaceBook has in recognizing that you multiple Social Network-s. EMail already handles that great. Google Me is supposedly going to recognize that as well.

Hmm, is a service provider the right place to integrate these media? Alternative would be in the apps themselves. Hmm...

Matthew Ingram compares the instead-of-EMail messaging model to Google Wave.

• Charlie O Donnell makes the same comparison. There are a lot of situations that I think Facebook is missing the subtle dynamics around with their new messaging platform. What happens if I’m set to get things via my Facebook inbox, but someone really needs to text me because they’re running late? Creating receiver centric messaging controls only works to an extent. Having the sender share the burden of figuring out appropriate channels makes for a more efficient, but not perfect, world vs just assuming I want every message in one place and that’s the way it should be.
• Charlie also makes a similar-to-above point about multiple Social Network-s. That’s the biggest problem with Facebook rolling out new features. They created a set of expectations as I built my Social Graph for how I was going to be connected to someone when I friended them, and then they layered on a bunch of tools that don’t mesh with those expectations. Once again, to get the most use out of a new Facebook product, I’m forced to categorize my friends, to roll back or adjust privacy settings, and perhaps to defriend some people entirely. It’s a social graph bait and switch that is much more time consuming than just organically deciding who is in who is out when in a single use application like Foursquare, when you have a good idea of what you’re getting into. I think it's ok to create this issue if you (a) have features to work around them (e.g. multiple graphs), and (b) document them. P2P/Dark Net platforms are going to have the same issue.

FaceBook is using HBase instead of Cassandra as the Data Store.