opinion

The rumours were true! Facebook did announce a new messaging system. But was it email? Well, Sort of! At Monday night’s (according to IST) event Facebook announced its new messaging system, said it would give everyone – who opted in – [username]@facebook.com email addresses but also insisted that the new system is not email. How? Read on to find out! The event was livestreamed courtesy of livestream . Right at the beginning, Zuckerberg describes an interaction he had with some school kids about email during which they called it ’slow’ and ‘too formal’ and how this shaped the new messaging platform that company was about the unveil. He then went on to rattle off some numbers about Facebook messages – 350 million users (thats about 70% of its user base) use Facebook’s messaging to send about 4 billion messages a day! And..a majority of these are private, one-to-one messaging. ( Image Credit) What it is.. It is essentially a ‘one service does all’ kind of thing when it comes to communication. It integrates emails, IMs, Facebook messages and text messages onto a single platform. As Facebook describes it, they’ve done 3 things to change the way we communication. Seamless messaging , conversation history and social inbox. This means that you should be able to communicate with someone over the same platform no matter what platform you are using. So if you’re in the middle of an IM conversation with someone, and they have to leave – you can continue that conversation by sending text messages instead of IMs (provided – said person has integrated his phone number with this messaging system). Conversation history keeps a history of all the communication you’ve had with one person. During the event, Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth explained this feature citing the example of his communication with his girlfriend.(Do I hear any ‘awww’s?) According to him – having all the conversation in one place instead of it being scattered over IMs/mails/text messages places them all in a certain context that makes them all the more meaningful. Social Inbox means that Facebook is going to use the information you have given it, through your social graph, to sort out your email. Any mail from your friends/contacts will go into ‘Messages’ and spam/fan page updates/messages from non-facebook friends will go into ‘Other’. Zuckerberg did clarify that you would be able move people from ‘Other’ to ‘Messages’ and vice versa to ensure that all future messages go into the appropriate folder. ( Image Credit ) On a side note, I wonder if this would be the place to throw in that Facebook Skype integration we heard about. I mean Voice + Text would certainly cover all the bases of communication! What it isn’t.. Now that we have an idea of what it does, it is equally important for us to get  a sense of what it does not. Given the hyperbole that preceded the event, many people over reached in their speculative attempts. Time to dispel all those notions. The first thing it is not is – An email/Gmail killer. At least not in the short run. Neither is it some magical thing that will suddenly solve your email noise/volume problems. While there is no perfect solution to these problems, the only way to get close is to organize your email habits. And to give you an idea of how far away from being a solution it is. Facebook has done away with subject lines. And the fact that it groups all your conversations by the person rather than subject (What subject?) makes it impossible to have any formalized, well constructed discussion. I’m not sure how the Conversation History aspect behaves with group messages. Don’t remember hearing anything about it during the event and nobody brought it up in the Q&A as well. Will they be grouped separately? Or duplicated across multiple pages? Guess I’ll just have to wait till I get my invite. The Good! It may not be the perfect messaging system, but it does seem to have a lot going for it. Heavy Facebook users are likely to take to it because it certainly does make communication simpler. Being platform agnostic, is probably its most powerful feature. I can also see ‘kids’ using it. The same ones that told Zuckerberg email was slow and formal. It even lets you filter the people who can message you by Friends, Friends of Friends and Everyone. So you can choose to make it exclusive or inclusive. Everything else will just bounce off. The Bad! It has plenty of flaws too. Simplicity comes at a price and I think Facebook may have faltered and got the balance wrong. But that is just my opinion. I don’t buy the ‘context logic’ with respect to conversation history. Doing away with subject lines may not be the smartest thing. If I need to quickly look back over what I said to someone, I’m not going to enjoy scrolling past every message we have ever exchanged. That better be one hell of a tweak on their search feature. In all probability people would restrict it to Friends and Friends of Friends to ensure that you strike the right balance of inclusivity and exclusivity. But theres the underlying and very flawed assumption that no one outside your friends circle will ever have anything useful to send you. I just glanced through my inbox. Of all the ‘useful’ mail I’ve got in the past 1 week not even one is from a ‘Facebook Friend’ and almost all the ‘useless’ mail comes from addresses that will find themselves in the ‘Everyone’ category. So how much will Social Inbox actually help? …and the Ugly? With anything Facebook does, there is always a privacy angle. There has been no uproar so far – it could be due to the fact that very people are using the service as of now. But we’ll keep our eyes open just in case. And if there is one, it could get pretty bad for Facebook. There was also an interesting post on TNW by Brad McCarty who states that most of the features that they’ve implemented are either already on Gmail or a mere Gmail Labs plugin away. Ouch! He even goes on to call it a trimmed down version of Google Wave in many ways. Those of you interested can request for an invite here and go through the FAQ here . It will be rolled over the next few months, with members of the press and valley power users getting the early set of invites. What it CAN be.. It is not targeted at your work email, because Facebook probably does not care about it. What it does care about, is your personal communication – and this new system is quite clearly focused on teens, pre teens and other Facebook addicts. And once it has a loyal set of early adopters, Do you think it stands to grow, relegating email to ‘that thing you check in office’? And what if it throws in Skype somewhere along the way? 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