Facebook Messages is an Attempt to Fix What’s Broken about Web Communication
Now that Facebook have announced their new messaging system, the reactions are pouring in: it has reinvented messaging; it’s trying to kill NYC start-up GroupMe; and of course, it might kill GMail.
But whether or not Facebook’s ‘Project Titan’ messaging revamp will kill anything is unclear. As with any new product – especially with Facebook – how people outside the tech world react is key.
But even if it’s a spectacular failure, Facebook’s new system is an attempt to fix what’s broken about electronic communication. While email, IM and texting were all boons when they were invented, they’ve become unwieldy and cumbersome, taking up too much time and requiring too much attention.
People have already spent a great deal of energy whining – saying things like they’d be too embarrassed to have a facebook.com email address – but Facebook’s solution to messaging is a big step forward
All Hail The Death of Email
Facebook messaging tackles one major problem: it turns email into a permission-based form of communication.
For years now, once you have given out your email address, it is always open to anyone who wants it. Like posting your phone number online, it means that you no longer have permission over who can contact you. This is why email is now broken: anyone can get in touch you, and most people with jobs or businesses are deluged with email. Sure, GMail Priority Inbox helped, but all it did was filter things, not lessen the amount of email you get.
One might argue that you could simply keep your address private. But anyone who works or does business online knows this isn’t an option. You have to make yourself available at some kind of email address. How else do you address clients, or get new business?
Think about how insane it is that people who don’t work in communications still spend half their day answering email, or that ‘Inbox Zero’ – meaning all messages in your inbox are read – is now so rare that it’s a thing people celebrate.
By allowing filtering of messages to either Facebook friends or friends of friends, Facebook have essentially tackled one of email’s biggest problems: there is too much of it, and too much from people and organizations you don’t care about. Messaging becomes a closed loop between people who know each other, not a deluge of information simply thrown at anyone and everyone. You can open up your inbox and get straight to the things you want, not what other people want you to see.
It is, at least as an idea about where messaging is going, a sign of better things to come.
Bringing Together The Fragments
If real estate is all about location, then 21st century web services are all about aggregation, aggregation, aggregation.
Facebook Messages unifies messaging across various platforms, centralizing your communication in a single place. This is great. While we usually communicate with work partners and clients through one form – say phone or email – we communicate with our actual friends and family through multiple forms: texts, chats, emails, phone calls etc.
By aggregating all of these activities together, Facebook makes it much easier to keep track of all those threads. I know I can’t be alone in making plans with people over text, email and the phone – by putting them all in one place (voice calls will be coming later), Facebook is tackling the other major problem of communication: fragmentation.
Even more neat is the idea that you can produce a narrative of your history with someone. Sure, that’ll be hell for when you break up with someone – but then, that’s what delete buttons are for.
A Murky Future: Will FB Ruin a Good Thing?
Now, all I’m saying is that this is a promising sign that someone is thinking about what’s broken in messaging today.
Facebook’s attempts are always a bit sketchy, and this is no different. There are bound to be privacy issues, and it’s useless to anyone who doesn’t want to use Facebook. That said, the idea behind these changes is solid, as it will make communicating easier and more straightforward.
What do you think of the new changes to Facebook? Could you see yourself using it? And what might some problems be with the new approach?
I can’t wait. Trying to get an invite. Being able to message without thinking about the easiest way to get a hold of someone will be very nice.
As much as giving that much control to FB irks me a little, I agree. The part that got me was about how they abstracted out all that stupid phone numbers, emails and other bulls**t and just allow people to communicate. If you think about it, that’s the core product of Facebook; that’s where people live online and you don’t have to worry about the small technical details.
I can’t see how this is going to be that much different from our email systems at the moment, it will probably work similar to normal email.
I have a Hotmail account that I’ve had since forever. I can block email addresses with Hotmail and I use their Junk feature all the time. After years of always marking spam and clicking the Junk button, I have pretty much eradicated spam from my email. But I still have to check the Junk folder once in awhile because, sometimes it thinks an email I want is junk.
So what can “facemail” do to change email? Will they only limit incoming emails to “Friends” or “Friends of Friends”? That’s no different than the facebook messaging system they have now.
What if I want to get email from someone who isn’t a friend? Let’s say I want to get emails from Techi, how would I be able to do that? Will I just have to use my regular email address? If they don’t limit the incoming emails, how will they stop spam? Will they have a pop-up that says “You have a message from blah blah blah, would you like to read it or mark it as spam?” If they do that, how do you know it’s spam? Will they have a button that says “Would you like to view this email to know if it is spam?” If they do, then this is just making you look at the email to know it’s spam, but that’s almost the same as regular emails.
I really like the facebook messaging system at the moment, because I hate using email to message friends, I prefer to use the facebook messaging system. The only thing I can think of that will make this good, is that I can email attachments (other than links, photos and video) to my friends.
I really don’t know how “facemail” will be different, but I’m very interested to see what they come up with.
Useful? Yes.
Revolutionary? No.
Family-friendly? Yes
Business friendly? No.
My point in the annoying intro to my comment is this: Sure, as with anyone else I’m all about making things easier, but this just won’t be any kind of life changing product. I can see this being useful for family members, mostly because I know some people aren’t as much into checking Facebook all the time as others. As far as close friends go though, come on… calling/texting is just fine. This is also pretty useless for business and I can see a lot of people not wanting to put an @facebook.com email on anything.
I really apologize for the horrible sentences, but I think I got my point and opinion across.
So the fix to the problem of too much email is to limit who can send it to you but at the same time
“You have to make yourself available at some kind of email address. How else do you address clients, or get new business?”
Kind of contradictory surely?