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.

Comments

Enough with the social networking.

[Murdoch5]

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.

Re:RFC? Standard?

[BitZtream]

Google opened up the federation protocol

Wave is built on top XMPP, federation was there before Google started even USING XMPP (which was with gchat).

Google didn't 'release' anything that wasn't already there.