DREAMING BIG
Facebook has an announcement they're excited about...Luke Shepard from the company has a post titled "Facebook Messaging just got better..." They should add, "...for Facebook". It remains to be seen how much better it is for Facebook users.
They're excited about an enhancement to the closed Facebook messaging system, explained as follows:
"Now you can enter a friend's email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them."
The problem I have with this though, is explained well by Michael Arrington:
"This is great news for people who use Facebook for most or all of their emailing. But for those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature.
That’s because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They’ll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it."
I can't tell you how irksome this inflexibility in the Facebook messaging system can get. There have been several instances when people have asked me to re-send them a Facebook message via their regular email, just so that the message can be part of their regular communication repository.
What's important to note here is that this is not just about a messaging system. For many people, their email system is the anchor to how they organize their life, their calendar, their to-dos, etc. When a system like Facebook creates a parallel stream of messages, it throws a serious monkey wrench in that organization system.
For Facebook of course, the ideal thing would be if the world would adopt their messaging system, and do away with regular email altogether. This wishful thinking is even seen in the tag line used by Facebook's Luke Shepard in the post above:
"Luke, a Facebook engineer, is never using email again. Ever."
That's some Koolaid at Facebook.
They do seem to want us all to go back to the good old days of "AOL Mail" walled garden, when one company controlled much of the mainstream email user base. Only thing missing is a voice announcing "You've got FaceMail". But that's probably part of a future Facebook announcement on Facebook Messaging getting better.
A few days ago, there was another heated discussion on Techmeme about how open Facebook could get. I had my own thoughts on the subject, citing my own item that I wished Facebook would open up on...add open messaging as a second item to that list.
Michael got it wrong for the email messages:
You DO get the full message in your email inbox if the message was sent from a Facebook user to an email address. You do not have to log in if a message is sent to your email address. Otherwise, how could you log in if you are not a member of Facebook and receive a message?
Posted by: Jamie | Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 05:12 AM