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New Facebook Messaging System Announced
Mark Zuckerberg just held a presentation to unveil Facebook's "next generation messaging" system. He repeatedly drove home the idea that "this is not email," nor is it "an email killer." Their plan is to tie together multiple forms of communication — email, texts, social updates, etc. — and blend them into conversations. As users go about their days, interacting with a variety of devices, the communication method automatically updates to whatever is appropriate at the time. If a user receives an email while he's at a desktop, browsing Facebook, it will bring up the message in a Facebook chat window. If the user is browsing on a smartphone, it will bring up the message there, instead. If it's a dumbphone, then a text message can be sent. Another central feature is the idea that conversation histories from multiple sources and different forms of communication can be integrated through Facebook, so that you no longer have to separately root through IM logs, SMS logs, old emails, etc., to see old correspondence. (Users will have the ability to delete these, should they desire.) The last major feature they mentioned is what they call the "social" inbox, which is based on whitelisting. Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently. The new system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months.
So, it's gmail/gchat? Whoopdedoo.
Facebook wants all your messages so they can mine them for any possible personal information and sell it to the highest bidders. Is anyone surprised?
Maybe somebody will figure out how to use it this time around.
That sounds very similar to the idea behind Wave.
Which is interesting, since it's not so long ago that the Wave creator quit Google for Facebook.
Let's see if the idea fares any better on facebook than it did on Google.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Another way to talk to people I never see in person!
Facebook is the only technologically literate company to get Social Networking correct. Where all others have failed, Facebook has broken through the weeds into the clearing and are far ahead of everyone else. Even the mighty Google failed with Buzz and now Facebook is doing something new and original by introducing a messaging system that is not designed to replace e-mail. Hopefully, if they get this correct, they will be able to log and store all your messages so that you never lose them even after you get drunk or high and try to delete them!
Zuckerberg has really turned it around with this move and let me be the first to welcome Zuckerberg to my browser where my industrious and productive Farmville makes every visitor happy. The future is here. The future is now. The future is Facebook.
when it was called google wave. I suspect it will have similar measure of success, though that will be hard to measure as it's integrated into facebook.
Website Hosting
I have FB's chat turned off at all time, because it sucked. And Google Wave failed. This will fail too. Sometimes I just like to have things separate.
The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.-- Joseph Priestley
Each web site will connect to other web sites in the middle of the night when rates are lowest. The web site will transfer mail from its users to the other web site's users, allowing for cheap long distance communication.
"Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently."
In other words, you will now be able to get to see just what you want and eliminate all the noise, spam and crap you never ever wanted to see in the first place...wasn't that the reason we signed up for social networking to begin with?
To me, facebook is admitting that their service is so flooded with crap that they now need a built-in crap filter to make it useful again.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Gmail without the Postini love, why do I want this again? What are they going to call it? FMail?
Facebook simply wants to coerce its users to put in real contact data, that is a lot more valuable to sell later:
- email accounts
- real mobile phone numbers
- IM accounts
"As users go about their days, interacting with a variety of devices,"
instead of humans.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
I have misgivings about giving Google access to this much data, and at least they promise to act responsibly.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Facebook has just announced a poorly defined incomprehensible complicated "reinvention" of an otherwise simple concept.
Seeing as how this what pretty much everything Facebook has released since the original service has looked like, I wonder how long Facebook will last before people realize the people running it are just really lucky hacks?
It was inevitable that Facebook would decide to become its own little internet. Good luck with that, Facebook.
that I might want to keep those things separate?...I know of so many people that meant to send private messages, and ended up posting to people's walls...I bet this will make things much much worse...
Seriously, this is one of those things that every major player has attempted at one time or another. The idea of having one interface for all of your stuff is great, but ALL of the big players (Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, etc.) have tried their hand at it and failed to seize the market.
And why did they fail? Interoperability and greed. They all want you to use only their platform. Until my Cisco IP phone can display text messages from my iPhone on the Rogers network, or until Exchange can display conversations from Google chat, this will NEVER happen. Facebook may have the majority market share on "Internet presence", but the vendors all need to play nice for truly unified communications.
Have they tried pushing this as a standard, distributed, normal internet protocol or is this just one more extension to facebook's "eco-system" that screws up internet principles?
Dead on Arrival.
In the beginning, the geeks floated in the muck with the commoners. And they were annoyed and so they built a boat on which to hide from that underneath.
And then the commoners heard of the boat and they too, came aboard.
And so then, the geeks, annoyed, hopped back into the mucky waters below, only to find it empty and serene.
And so is my view of the Internet, as I watch the shadows of the SS Facebook floating above me. I can hear it's muted basslines if I stop long enough to listen.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
In Korea^H^H^H^H^H Facebook, email is for old people.
mean that you actually have to check the spam to be sure that won't be receiving mail from people you didnt approved yet, thats so 2003's. I prefer Gmail approach.
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just done the Internet equivalent of starting a land war in Asia"
I may be totally wrong, but I always thought that this unified messaging/conversations was what the Nepomuk/Akonadi was trying to eventually achieve. http://nepomuk.kde.org http://pim.kde.org/akonadi
Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.
Its more like googles integrated messaging suite -- with the Gmail integrated interface with chat, email, status updates (Buzz), voice messaging/calling, etc., options for many of those to be delivered to phones via SMS, etc.
Yes, because FMail comes before GMail, although both come after Email. I propose... AMail.
It'll be called Facebook Mail, or just shortened to Facial.
There is WAY to much social online networking happening. Of all the amount of social network that happens, I'll say that less then 10% is actually for networking and 90% is about being pointlessly social. Being social for the sake of being social is useless, great I have 10000000 facebook friend Woot!!!
Great I got 10 emails that aren't useful. I got 10 new text messages that aren't useful. All of these advancement that are meant to tie us closer to social networking are actually making us more Dependant on knowing whats uselessly going on. If we gave 1/2 the amount of effort into improving business that we put into keeping in contact with people we'd have trillion dollar company's that keep increasing in value.
Email works, texts work, SMS and MMS are fine. How many decades have we not had an issue with keeping in contact with who matters. All facebook is trying to do is actually devert the attention we should be giving to our jobs to a site which doesn't assist in completing and useful work. if you want proper social networking that helps you use linkedin if you want to be wasting time and showing off how many friends you have you use facebook.
Another horrible idea from facebook thats going to make that ahole another billion dollars. He has a horrible site that doesn't help anyone do anything but yet is a billionaire. Then again so is Bill Gates and he makes a product which is also horrible. I guess the moral of the story is make crap and make a billion. For once can we stop hearing about what useless feature facebook is adding and maybe focus on what useful feature our computers are going to have or maybe what useful features were getting to make business and engineering more streamed line.
facebook is for blonds (C) IRC
Fail? :)
Still skeptical on this one, nothing new and just a shiny interface for basically already existing services. And the facebook.com email address I feel will be a bad idea as it will confuse brand from its employees.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
.nt
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does it have a 'real' delete button?
Zuckerberg made it clear that this service is the result of product research. He said that young people consistently told him email was "too slow." When he dug into their answer they didn't mean slow as in "it takes too long to get to you", they meant they didn't want to have to log into yet another application to read their emails. Among that demographic, a sizable number don't even use a separate email account. They just use SMS on phones and Facebook (either chat or messaging) to communicate. So the main benefits he and "Bozz", his Director of Engineering touted was the reduced friction involved in being able to quickly message through the app you're probably already logged into with the knowledge that your message will get through to the recipient whether or not they use Facebook.
Imagination is more important than knowledge -Einstien
Based on preliminary information I heard from the Facebook launch announcement today [...] users will not have the ability to declare chats or related conversations to be "off the record" -- everything will apparently be recorded. Individual users will have the ability to archive or delete their own copies of transcripts, but it appears that there is explicitly not a functionality similar to Google's "off the record" chat feature, which permits users to declare that their conversations with given individuals should not be routinely preserved. "It just didn't make sense for us," were pretty much the words that Zuckerberg used in response to a question on this topic."
http://www.google.com/buzz/lauren4321/Am7dw5mhpRi/Facebooks-new-chat-email-feature-apparently
So is Facebook now officially the same thing as AOL from 15 years ago, minus keywords?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Sorry guys, but I trust the brain power at Google to keep my emails safer than Facebook. Not to dis Facebook engineers, but they are nowhere near the capacity of Google. If I'm going to send information that I don't want leaked or have conversations that need to be private, I'm not looking to Facebook anytime soon as the conduit.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I'm an avid web developer and an early adopter techie. I couldn't pay attention past the first sentence of the slashdot summary, let alone be bothered to figure out what way facebook has figured out how to rob my grandma of her privacy next.
Honestly, it just sounds like whoop-dee-fucking-doo bells and whistles on top of status updates.
Here's some advice Zuckerberg. When you can summarize it in a sentence, people will pay attention.
Then again, what do I know. I never would have guessed you could build a hundred million dollar company by enabling people to tell their friends where they eat dinner and how well they are doing at bejeweled.
Where, oh, where do I sign up to have all of my private communications routed through an entity that has zero respect for my privacy?
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Can't wait for more privacy to be lost to corporate greed.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
He repeatedly drove home the idea that "this is not email," nor is it "an email killer."
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/15/gmail-beware-facebook-unveils-e-mail-service/
"E-MAIL WAR: Facebook Launches 'Gmail Killer' -- AOL Jumps In, Too"
Yum, sensationalism.
I think this is more likely to be a threat to Hotmail or AOL Mail than Gmail. Gmail is a power user's tool while Hotmail is more likely to be used by people who share photos/humorous pictures/jokes with friends and relatives - something that has considerable crossover with Facebook. OK, there are people who use Hotmail for professional purposes, but it has to be said that doing so looks unprofessional. As a Gmail user of three and a half years I really don't think Facebook's offering is at all likely to make me want to switch.
It is called Gmail. And it allows for voice calls and video chat. And it has Buzz integration.
But when Facebook invents it years later, it will be revolutionary and a Gmail killer.
And in truth, Gmail did one-up themselves with Wave, but most people have no idea what it is, so it didn't catch on. The only reason I didn't use Wave is that the people I wanted to talk to didn't have Wave accounts. But Wave really is a brilliant integration of email, IM and more into one.
Sadly, Facebook's solution will be closed, won't allow you to export your contacts (or email) and will have zero privacy. And it will be insanely popular.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's not Google Wave, it's Wuphf!!! (which coincidentally is what this week's Office episode is about) I hope I can link it to my fax machine.
Forget about "teh Facebook is da devilz yo!" rhetoric for a moment and think about the feature itself. You send a message to a person and he receives it in the most convenient way possible for the moment (sms, chat window, email), that's pretty neat.
~Syberz
Time to start working on that gmail filter that bounces emails from @facebook.com saying, "Get an email account!"
...ppl still use that?
As a college student, I already find Facebook private messages to be the most reliable way to communicate with other college students and younger. The reason? Everyone is on Facebook multiple times a day and many of my friends have Facebook messages set to be sent to their phones or receive a notification on their smartphone when they receive one. Email? Well its really only used for "boring" communication like stuff from teachers and classmates for group projects.
Plus I only know a handful of my Friends email addresses anyways, whereas I can message anyone on Facebook by their name. I really do believe that is the future of social communication. Sure email will always exist for business communication, getting bills, etc. but as a way to say "hey, want to do such and such tomorrow?" definitely not. All this Facebook messages thing is doing is recognizing how people already use the messages feature and expand its capabilities to better serve that use.
Oh, and the combination of different mediums of messaging is long overdue. I always feel silly every time I'm sitting in front of my laptop and yet typing way on my 3.5 inch touch screen to send a text message. Or the awkwardness (awkward really isn't the right word, but weirdness of some sort) when I start talking to someone on Facebook chat and realize that I missed a text from them on my cell phone and completely ignored it. Or had an instant message from them on iChat. Or the usual "hey did you get my email" when I'm talking to someone on instant messenger. Really that is just silly we need a cohesive messaging system.
maybe just "F'AIL"
Well, if you could believe that he actually thinks that way and was not just deliberately stirring the pot in order to hawk his book, Tim Wu, who was mentioned in this slashdot story just two stories below this one, should technically feel very stupid right now for saying the Apple is the greatest danger to information freedom right before Facebook announces this.
;)
At least the guy has impeccable timing in regards to putting his foot in his mouth
Maybe somebody will figure out how to use it this time around.
Actually, this might be the right place for it.
We had a big* earthquake here in NH a few months ago about 11:30. A big data-gathering/experience sharing thing broke out on a few friends' comments. Many of our friend circles' overlapped, but there were people on each node that weren't seeing data on the other nodes. We'd worked out a non-explosion event, about where it was centered, about a half hour before the USGS data went up on their site.
I thought: "Oh, so this is what Wave was for!" And then, "oh, and this is why Wave hasn't succeeded - no network effect value."
* for NH
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I personally look forward to the day while instead of keeping coming up with useless things like this someone comes up with a robust, open, secure standard for email that everybody uses. That, and a decent email client that can handle several thousand messages without choking itself to death..
I initially thought this would be a good thing for Facebook relinquishers like me. I still have some friends who use that crap, and sometimes they use it to distribute invitations to potlucks or whatever. I always tell them: Just send a fucking email, I mean, how hard is it to include people in the header? Just copy it from the last email we sent around!
Anyway, insofar at Facebook's messaging standard is inching closer to a public, non-proprietary standard (email), we've made some progress. But then again, I might be missing something.
...was gained.
It's actually worse than that. If Facebook is going to wind up having direct access to your e-mail, then they are also able to mine information from your contacts (who may not wish to have anything to do with Facebook, have not given their consent, and have no way of detecting in advance that this will happen) from your end.
This, of course, is pretty standard Facebook MO; see the whole fiasco about importing contact details etc. lately. However, it's even more creepy than usual, because it's entering a space where people expect that e-mail is passed from senders to recipients through neutral service providers, without the mass of data mining on the way. And yes, I do have similar concerns about Google Mail.
IMHO, service providers should be service providers and social/data mining companies should be social/data mining companies. The trend to mix them up fundamentally compromises privacy on a new level and ultimately could undermine the whole collaborative/open nature of Internet communications. It's somewhat like the common carrier principle: you can provide a communications channel transparently and neutrally, and be accorded some basic protections for doing so, or you can actively be involved in scanning or altering the content, but then you need to be regulated for privacy purposes, editorially responsible for the content, etc. Providing the exemptions/protections without the responsibility seems like a recipe for disaster to me.
On the bright side, perhaps we will finally get the long-overdue switch to end-to-end encrypted e-mail by default after enough unfortunate people get burned due to leaks.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Given that pretty much everyone these days has a Facebook account, this means that I now have a good way of messaging those people - in a way that virtually guarantees that they'll see it! - without having to even sign up for Facebook.
Yes, let's give Facebook control over all of our mobile devices and access to all of our electronic communication. Sounds like a fantastic idea to me.
Dear Public,
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, email, text, social history, phone list, SMS correspondence, and IM logs.
Love, Mark
Another central feature is the idea that conversation histories from multiple sources and different forms of communication can be integrated through Facebook, so that you no longer have to separately root through IM logs, SMS logs, old emails, etc., to see old correspondence. (Users will have the ability to delete these, should they desire...
Currently hooked on AMP
Facebook hasn't exactly earned the trust necessary or shown the kind of respect for user privacy that would make me want to route everything I say to everyone else through them.
Why do I have to pay separately for two different ways of essentially sending text and content (the same thing)? $30 dollars for unlimited texts and $30 for unlimited email (via data plan). In this economy, I don't think this charity was going to last long. Facebook gives me a one stop place to send my landlord an email and my friend a text. If I can drop the text plan, I am game.
damn slashdot filtering out my massive block of HAHA
Skate boarding is not a crime, and neither is posting giant blocks of laughter ascii art
Fail
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
I look forward to more hilarious stories on Lamebook...one receives a job offer through email from a prospective employer and it immediately gets posted on the user's wall...if your current boss reads it...you're out of the door..
The possibilities of such snafus are endless...(/me adds lamebook.com to bookmarks)
And all the Twitter and Facebook basher here shall read it, then crawl back into their basements.
I grudgingly joined facebook this summer after I realised all my old (non nerd) friends used it as their means of keeping in touch rather than email. And I really enjoy the interaction there, getting to see each other's photos and hear about their everyday lives,which may be dull to everyone else here, but these are my real actual friends, who I don't see as often as I'd like due to geography.
All this anti-social-networking noise around here seems to be like a bunch of old farts moaning about everyone using email and SMS when the telephone is good enough.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
i understand the importance of grouping together social info to a single place,to avoid having to use 50 different apps. Butt it's been already done better in the past.
stuff like unified inbox in thunder mail
the capability of all libpurple based chat client to merge contacts from various chat systems (including FB's)
the 'Synergy' merging system which is central to Palm's WebOS (and, adds among other, SMS to the libpurple mix)
what makes these system better is that the 'mixing' is done at the application level, client side.
- so the user is still in control and doesn't surrender its data to FB. This is actually important as mail, chat, etc. also are used in the professionnal world where trade secrets and nda exist. It's okay if all my coomunications are combined in an unified display in my phone. It might be policy violations if the data goes through Facebook (or Google) first.
- a user-side application won't necessarily break the user experience integration. Witness Synergy on WebOs : your online data (FB, Google) plays nice with the rest, and everything is grouped in the same PIM apps (calendar). As opposed to what FB is advocating: that their webpage becomes the one stop for everything - phone wise: their app becomes a gglorified and over blown PIM-suite not necessarily integrating well with the rest.
- last but not least by letting FB do the integration, you know that they'll only open to a select few (namely: intagrate only FB, mail and SMS). Whereas,with Pidgin (thanks to their own libpurple) I can have the chat coming from FB's chat, StudiVZ chat (main FB concurrent in Germany) *and* GoogleTalk's chat, all grouped into my single app.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The big difference this time is that Facebook will actually embed the thing into their existing platform, so the "I don't know anyone to Wave with" hurdle that plagued Wave will be curled right over.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
The big difference this time is that Facebook will actually embed the thing into their existing platform, so the "I don't know anyone to Wave with" hurdle that plagued Wave will be curled right over.
But it will still suck. GW sucked because it was difficult to find out what's going on in a branching conversation; you'd end up lost in the page, trying to find what changed and work out whether you care.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I sent feedback asking for this which I didn't get a response (not surprised). They already send you copies of the messages you receive, so why not let me complete my archive by sending me a copy of what I write to others?
Not a major technological difficulty, but would be nice.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...