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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.
Not to worry. If it proves to be a useful and popular feature, Diaspora will undoubtedly implement it too, eventually.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
"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
Is anyone surprised?
I am a little surprised that there's not already a story about how this will lead to massive privacy breaches. Whether that's because facebook is getting better about privacy, getting better about avoiding bad press about privacy breaches, or whether that's because everyone who would have written an article about the privacy breaches gave up assuming anything facebook does will have the same effect, I don't know.
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?
The similarities to Wave were the first thing that came to my mind. As an aside, I think Google should have blended wave into gmail, not had them side-by-side. None-the-less, I have to think some of this had to been cooking long before the google guy jumped ship - there just hasn't been enough time to design/build/test a change this big to their service, imho... unless I'm underestimating how robust their agile development processes are. . .
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.
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Haha! Nope. This is... Google Wave. Anybody remember that that Australian guy that just left Google to work at Facebook? Yep, Wave was his brainchild and his last project for Google. It was all about "conversations" and such. Lars Rasmussen will finally see Wave go prime-time. It'll just be a highly streamlined/tailored version for Facebook. You guys remember the big Wave beta video where people were calling Wave a Facebook Killer? Ironic.
And when that doesn't work, they'll adjust their privacy settings and boom, your "private" conversations will be public for all - just google search what your boss really thinks of you!
In the meantime, just have one of your mutual friends forward stuff to you. (There is no privacy on facebook if unless it's all marked "Only Me". Because otherwise it's like email - it can be forwarded and reposted and the like by your friends. And we all know how well those "email DRM" things work.).
Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.
Note that newest version of Google Docs does suddenly have really, really, excellent collaborative editing, and I've heard people say that the tech came from Wave...
We live, as we dream -- alone....