Facebook's biggest project yet - allowing users to message each other

[ezrast]

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/15/live-blog-facebooks-big-announcement/?mod=e2tw

From watching the announcement, it's just a messaging relay so that your friend can (say) SMS your FB account and you'll receive it as (say) an email. This kind of thing could be neat, but none of the problems they are trying to solve can't be fixed just by using email correctly (at least, once smart phones are ubiquitous). Kids these days don't know how email clients work though so it's Zuckerburg to the rescue. Of course, all the major news sites are reporting it as a revolutionary new messaging system that probably won't kill email, as if it actually competes with email in some way (seemed like they were pretty clear in the announcement that it's not an email competitor, but every writeup I've seen is treating those comments like they come with a side of wink wink nudge nudge).

I'll admit, seeing it does kind of make me want a mail client with a more IM-like interface, where one click would bring up a contact's history and then you could immediately begin typing your message. It doesn't make me want to start letting Facebook decide who gets to show up in my "important" box and how urgently I need to be notified of their message. What do you all think? Can email be revived as our primary means of electronic communication? Will consolidating our methods of communication actually help communication?

[MahrinSkel]

I'll admit, seeing it does kind of make me want a mail client with a more IM-like interface, where one click would bring up a contact's history and then you could immediately begin typing your message.

Kind of like GMail with Google Chat, and maybe some Google Voice SMS forwarding on the side?  They never mentioned Google once, because they're hoping that any of their users that don't already know that the Googleplex does everything FB is trying to, and more, won't find out before they're gotten used to FB's version.

--Dave

[KallDrexx]

This will be huge.  It's google wave with a purpose (I think fb hired some wave devs too).   I don't know that I will use it, but I know plenty of people that will.

It does more than gmail with chat, it has (theoretically) intelligence built in so you don't know (nor care) how your message gets to the person and better message prioritization.  Fb has more information on this to make this work than google

[Margalis]

Kind of like GMail with Google Chat, and maybe some Google Voice SMS forwarding on the side?  They never mentioned Google once, because they're hoping that any of their users that don't already know that the Googleplex does everything FB is trying to, and more, won't find out before they're gotten used to FB's version.

Or because nobody gives a shit about Google. I've never even heard of Google Chat before. I suppose it's like Froogle, Orkut and the million other half-assed Google projects left to wither on the vine?

[K9]

Literally everyone I know uses google chat; it's the chat built into GMail.

[Chimpy]

It's great! you can now choose which company to let datamine all of your personal communications to sell to the highest bidder, google or facebook!

[Merusk]

It's great! you can now choose which company to let datamine all of your personal communications to sell to the highest bidder, google or facebook!

That was my thought as well. 

[NiX]

It won't fair any better than Googles attempts to fill this gap. Email is where important stuff gets sent and it'll continue to be that way for a long time. I refuse to plan anything through SMS/FB because it's terribly unreliable and hard to keep track of anything. With GMail I can simply open the email thread, see what's been talked about and carry on.

[KallDrexx]

It won't fair any better than Googles attempts to fill this gap.

The difference I see is that if anyone wants to switch to google mail, they have to do a complete switch.  Before I went to gmail, I never went to gmail's website (obviously).  However, even as someone who barely uses Facebook, I do go to Facebook.com and I do already get notifications of messages.  If I start getting more and more messages, I will be notified through my normal daily use of the website and it will encourage me to use it more. 

As Facebook.com is becoming the main source of social interactions on the net, it will be easier for them to add services in a consolidated way that will gain traction.  All of Google's services feel (and are) disconnected.  For example, visiting google.com to do a search doesn't notify me of new mail, new rss feeds, voicemails, etc..  Even on my Android phone, all of those services are disconnected, which means that if I want to use a new service by Google, I have to change my usage habits to accommodate those habits.  That is not the case with Facebook adding services, they are just available right there in front of me.

[Engels]

This is why I use yahoo. They were the first to cave into our Chinese overlords and may be spared the firing squad on the great day of liberation. QQ

[NiX]

Even on my Android phone, all of those services are disconnected, which means that if I want to use a new service by Google, I have to change my usage habits to accommodate those habits.  That is not the case with Facebook adding services, they are just available right there in front of me.

I agree with you up until here. Android does connect everything. The minute I tied my Google account to my HTC Hero it did the following: Synced contacts, synced GMail, Synced my Calendar and logged me into Google Chat. If there's anything Google has done with Android, it's make sure that all of their apps are tied together.

[Teleku]

Kind of like GMail with Google Chat, and maybe some Google Voice SMS forwarding on the side?  They never mentioned Google once, because they're hoping that any of their users that don't already know that the Googleplex does everything FB is trying to, and more, won't find out before they're gotten used to FB's version.

Or because nobody gives a shit about Google. I've never even heard of Google Chat before. I suppose it's like Froogle, Orkut and the million other half-assed Google projects left to wither on the vine?

Was this sarcasm, or a hugely blatant troll or something?  Please?

[ezrast]

It's great! you can now choose which company to let datamine all of your personal communications to sell to the highest bidder, google or facebook!

Why choose? Just have Facebook forward all your communications to gmail, Google Chat, and your Android phone!

Kind of like GMail with Google Chat, and maybe some Google Voice SMS forwarding on the side?  They never mentioned Google once, because they're hoping that any of their users that don't already know that the Googleplex does everything FB is trying to, and more, won't find out before they're gotten used to FB's version.

Or because nobody gives a shit about Google. I've never even heard of Google Chat before. I suppose it's like Froogle, Orkut and the million other half-assed Google projects left to wither on the vine?

Was this sarcasm, or a hugely blatant troll or something?  Please?

Facebook's target market doesn't give a shit about Google (aside from web search) the same way they don't get a shit about email. Contacts? Chat? Image uploads? Facebook does all that stuff, and arguably does it better.

To Margalis, iirc Google Chat is actually extra half-assed in that it's just an implementation of Jabber, and that's it. They didn't even try to pretend like there was any reason to use it over any other chat program, except for the web client built into gmail (actually I just looked it up and it's "Google Talk" now and has added voice/video, but whatever).

Hmm, now I'm going to go look up Jabber again and see if it's gone anywhere. The one thing email can't do is tell me when my contacts are online - which Facebook is trying to render irrelevant by just texting you if you're not at your computer. Which seems counter-intuitive to me, since I'm obviously not going to be as chatty with my friend who is busy at the grocery store or whatever than I would if I know they're just dicking around on the internet.

[Vaiti]

Or because nobody gives a shit about Google. I've never even heard of Google Chat before. I suppose it's like Froogle, Orkut and the million other half-assed Google projects left to wither on the vine?

Was this sarcasm, or a hugely blatant troll or something?  Please?

He has a point. I'm highly skeptic of alot of Google projects nowdays due to things like Wave and Buzz etc; Good ideas in theory that just don't work in practice. Anyone remember that weird Second Life project they had a couple years back? WTF was that all about. I have no idea.

 I'm still a huge Google fanboi regardless. How he has never heard of Google Chat is abit  however.

[Lantyssa]

The difference I see is that if anyone wants to switch to google mail, they have to do a complete switch.  Before I went to gmail, I never went to gmail's website (obviously).  However, even as someone who barely uses Facebook, I do go to Facebook.com and I do already get notifications of messages.  If I start getting more and more messages, I will be notified through my normal daily use of the website and it will encourage me to use it more. 

I use gmail and I never go to their website.  Facebook messages I ignore and am tempted to discontinue completely because they're all useless annoying spammy shit.

Maybe it'll catch on with kids, but planning your own communication needs on a system devoted to the attention span of kids will be good for about two years before the next 'big thing' catches on.

[KallDrexx]

I agree with you up until here. Android does connect everything. The minute I tied my Google account to my HTC Hero it did the following: Synced contacts, synced GMail, Synced my Calendar and logged me into Google Chat. If there's anything Google has done with Android, it's make sure that all of their apps are tied together.

That's because of HTC not because of Android.  On my Moto Droid, I entered my Google email and Got email and calendar sync, that's it.  Google talk I assume I have to activate separately as I have yet to ever get a message on my phone without meebo, as do I have to activate Google voice separately.   Google voice is next to worthless because I get an email about an SMS or voicemail wayyy before I get a notification from Google Voice.

I use gmail and I never go to their website.  Facebook messages I ignore and am tempted to discontinue completely because they're all useless annoying spammy shit.

You had to actively set something up to check the mail for you though (Google toolbar, iPad, your phone, outlook, whatever), and that's my point.  At some point you had to consciously decide to sign up for Gmail and set things up so you could receive Gmail.  The attraction about FB messaging is that you are already notified and transitioned without conscious effort, and thus its' easier to adapt to.

Maybe it'll catch on with kids, but planning your own communication needs on a system devoted to the attention span of kids will be good for about two years before the next 'big thing' catches on.

I think you are writing FB off too much on this.  Remember, Facebook originally only was meant for college "kids" and has now grown to every demographic.  Many people much older are now using Facebook to keep in touch with people.  Facebook isn't just about communicating but finding people to communicate, something traditional email does not help with.

[Vaiti]

Don't know about that bit about it being HTC and not Android. I have a Desire but ditched the Sense rom after playing with it for about a week. One thing I noticed with Sense is the neato contact merging between Facebook and Google contact, which is done via faux tags inserted into the Google Contacts entries to give Sense an area to anchor to. That was neat, but other than that I didn't see Sense doing anything special that stock Android wasn't already doing.

I do have the same issue you have with Talk, but I had the same issue with Sense, and I just never bothered to play around with settings. It doesn't appear to automatically connect out of the box. Voice works fine for me as soon as it is installed and run once however.

[fuser]

To Margalis, iirc Google Chat is actually extra half-assed in that it's just an implementation of Jabber, and that's it. They didn't even try to pretend like there was any reason to use it over any other chat program, except for the web client built into gmail (actually I just looked it up and it's "Google Talk" now and has added voice/video, but whatever).

Hmm, now I'm going to go look up Jabber again and see if it's gone anywhere. The one thing email can't do is tell me when my contacts are online - which Facebook is trying to render irrelevant by just texting you if you're not at your computer. Which seems counter-intuitive to me, since I'm obviously not going to be as chatty with my friend who is busy at the grocery store or whatever than I would if I know they're just dicking around on the internet.

Google chat/talk seems to be an implementation of jingle on top of XMPP. Facebook uses XMPP also to federate other clients into their chat system if you don't want to login via web. I'd like to know more about the guts of the messaging network but it could be a back-end of XMPP with gateways for SMS and then threading it all together with messages off of your contacts.

[Tale]

Facebook recruited Lars Rasmussen from Google. Lars Rasmussen was the main mind behind Google Wave.

Now Facebook turns out to have this project.

[naum]

Turning off all this stuff — IRC, ICQ, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Virb, Orkut, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, etc.… including even old-fangled email.

Henceforth, my only communication channel shall be F13 chat  

[Trippy]

It won't fair any better than Googles attempts to fill this gap. Email is where important stuff gets sent and it'll continue to be that way for a long time. I refuse to plan anything through SMS/FB because it's terribly unreliable and hard to keep track of anything. With GMail I can simply open the email thread, see what's been talked about and carry on.

Kids these days don't use email, it's too slow...

[ghost]

Email will continue to be around as long as businesses use it.  Just ask IE6.   

[Ingmar]

I found a user using Outlook 2000 earlier this week.

[Teleku]

My company has everybody on outlook 2000.   

[ezrast]

Maybe it'll catch on with kids, but planning your own communication needs on a system devoted to the attention span of kids will be good for about two years before the next 'big thing' catches on.

I think you are writing FB off too much on this.  Remember, Facebook originally only was meant for college "kids" and has now grown to every demographic.  Many people much older are now using Facebook to keep in touch with people.  Facebook isn't just about communicating but finding people to communicate, something traditional email does not help with.

Not really. How many friends have you made exclusively through Facebook? Zuckerburg himself said something about how Facebook was about mapping out your social network, not expanding it.

I don't know if Facebook's project has a limited lifespan, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot fewer people find the service useful than they are expecting. For me, "slow, formal" email and "fast, simple" texts and IMs already naturally serve as the social graph that FB is touting it will use to separate friendly messages from everything else. I think a lot of people will try it and find out that merging all of those signal lines into one amorphous data stream that only Facebook has the power to sort is a lot less usesful than it sounds.

[Merusk]

My company has everybody on outlook 2000.   

In addition to core company apps being IE6 only, my former company has everyone on outlook and office '97.    

[Ingmar]

Man I should save all these for the next time the CEO complains to me that we're still on Exchange 2003.

[MahrinSkel]

I simply don't want to be inundated by the minutiae of everyone else's lives.  I don't get notifications from FB for anything but friend requests, and I rarely go to Facebook for anything else (usually only to try to contact someone I no longer have email/phone for).  To me, the fact that FB wants to make this shit follow me *everywhere* is not a selling point.

--Dave

[Chimpy]

One good thing about Facebook: it has almost removed the email-chain-letter "this is cool" crap people used to send me because they all do that on facebook now. Of course, almost no one has my email address anymore so that might be a part of it.

[Margalis]

Was this sarcasm, or a hugely blatant troll or something?  Please?

Google has like a billion different projects, out of which I and most other people can name 3 or 4. The fact that Google already does something...? Google does pretty much everything in some form, there is probably set of google kitchen appliances.

The thing about messages or email on Facebook that is interesting is the Facebook part, not the IM/email/SMS part.

[KallDrexx]

Not really. How many friends have you made exclusively through Facebook? Zuckerburg himself said something about how Facebook was about mapping out your social network, not expanding it.

I don't mean finding people to talk to as in, you meet strangers through Facebook (although Facebook has been associated with a rise of Syphillis, and some people in the Internet dating thread even said they use FB to find hookups).  I meant that you reconnect with people you once knew through Facebook and Facebook allows you to hold on to that social network much longer than with traditional email.  

I would have never emailed most of the people from High School that I have on Facebook and would have completely lost touch with them, but now I have them on my friends list and once and a while we'll comment together on something.  The same goes with the people I met on my trip to Africa a few months ago.  With email I most likely wouldn't ever talk with them ever again, but with FB I can still have those communications with them spontaneously.

[Morat20]

I simply don't want to be inundated by the minutiae of everyone else's lives.  I don't get notifications from FB for anything but friend requests, and I rarely go to Facebook for anything else (usually only to try to contact someone I no longer have email/phone for).  To me, the fact that FB wants to make this shit follow me *everywhere* is not a selling point.

--Dave

Yeah, pretty much this. Facebook is basically my internet address book, wherein I can reliably get their current email address.

[Draegan]

Literally everyone I know uses google chat; it's the chat built into GMail.

My fiancee who knows nothing about computers uses Gchat all the time with all of her friends.

[fuser]

My company has everybody on outlook 2000.   

Outlook 2000 has a really cool feature which was folder syncing and sharing via SMTP they called it net folder or something. Without the use of an Exchange server you could share a folder with basic security completely over any SMTP/POP service between two or more Outlook 2000 clients. Was a great feature they ripped out (as buggy as it was) 

[naum]

I simply don't want to be inundated by the minutiae of everyone else's lives.  I don't get notifications from FB for anything but friend requests, and I rarely go to Facebook for anything else (usually only to try to contact someone I no longer have email/phone for).  To me, the fact that FB wants to make this shit follow me *everywhere* is not a selling point.

--Dave

Yeah, pretty much this. Facebook is basically my internet address book, wherein I can reliably get their current email address.

I just do FB to see people's pics…