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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.
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?
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!
I have misgivings about giving Google access to this much data, and at least they promise to act responsibly.
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Actually, I suspect that the fact that it's integrated right into Facebook will make it far more successful than Wave was. It may still not be a resounding success / 'gmail killer', but I've already seen a lot of my less-technical friends move to Facebook messaging for most of their communications with friends - event invites, messages, chat, wall updates, etc., all going through Facebook. If Facebook continues to grow, it could very well become the "platform of choice" for messaging for a large number of people. Wave honestly wasn't pushed that hard, and it wasn't really marketed as "something to do awesome messaging!" It was, "This thing we built that's kinda neat, see what you think."
Facebook is also MUCH more aggressive than Google about opting-in users for new services.
I'm not saying any of this is necessarily a *good* thing - in fact, for privacy, it will probably be a very bad thing - but I expect this service will be significantly more successful than Wave, simply because Facebook is huge, and they're not above using that size to opt-in every single one of their users for a new service. And while some of their use-cases seem to be a little creepy, they do (for better or worse), seem to think about "what are our users going to *do* with this thing?" Wave was sort of billed as "a cool collaboration thingy that you should totally check out. if you want to. Maybe? Please?" It was a cool piece of tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.
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
Also, unless you change the default settings, opt out, and keep up wit the changes, other people will be allowed to read your email, and send email on you behalf.
Actually your primary communications forums in Facebook aren't "flooded by crap," unless you accept every invite and request sent to you - and in that case, you might as well submit your email address to every web site you visit that asks you to "register", you'll get the same results. If Facebook starts allowing people to message you using "@facebook.com" email addresses, you will rapidly end up receiving spam there. I have no need for a whitelist at present, because my friends on Facebook are only (and actually) the people I care to communicate with, and I ignore any requests from people I don't know. If they were to expose an @facebook.com email address, then any J Random Spambot can message me... and that'd be a problem. Implementing a whitelist is pretty much the only way to prevent that.