Mark Zuckerberg took the stage today during a live stream event and confirmed all of the rumors about Facebook announcing a new messaging platform. The focus was on three key areas.
Seamless Messaging
Communicating with different people requires us to think of which way each person tends to prefer to hear from us. One person may be easiest to reach via SMS, another might be email. But Facebook aims to make us not worry about that and instead just send a message – any message.
- The new system will handle SMS, all brands of Instant Messaging, E-mail, and Facebook messages
- The system also offers @facebook.com email addresses, which are presumably required to take advantage of all of the integration. You’ll get the email address that matches your user ID. (ie- facebook.com/johnpoz = johnpoz@facebook.com)
Conversation History
A benefit of a seamless messaging platform that aggregates all contact mediums is that it offers the opportunity to also combine conversation history.
- You can get an email from a friend and then view it in the timeline with all of your other communications with that person. You then respond to it via email instantly just like it was SMS.
- In order to handle all of this technically they have invested in new infrastructure for their Apache Hadoop platform and extending other systems such as their photo handling system, caching, etc. The goal is to ensure a robust and reliable architecture for long term usage.
Social Inbox
Since Facebook already knows who you consider to be a “Friend” the new system will filter all of the messages similar to modern spam catching applications.
- Messages will initially come into your Messages folder if they are from your friends or their friends.
- Other messages will go into the “Other folder”.
- You can move people between your Messages and Other folder whenever you feel like it.
- If you want to not get any mail from people other than friends you can set the service to literally bounce mail from anyone else.
Availability
The new messaging platform will initially be invitation only, and will be rolled out over the next several months. It’ll be interesting to see how the early users who are exposed to the system feel about it. You can see Facebook’s official blog post on the subject here.
What do you think? Will you shift your messaging habits to flow through Facebook? Or do you have concerns about doing so?
Cali, I deleted my Facebook account some time ago and won’t be going back. There were lots of reasons for the decision, but chief among them was the cavalier attitude about privacy that Facebook seems to have. The more information they gather the worse that’s going to be for users. I for one will find other ways to stay in touch and share with the people that matter to me.
With so many companies blocking facebook access already I doubt it will ever be something more that another free gimmick. If I get an ad embedded email from a facebook user I’ll block them all. Lol.
I think we should all be very careful about how much information we share with companies that do not care about privacy (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.)
Simple messages … that’s fine. Email … no. I’m happy enough to use my ISP’s email address with the default email clients on OSX and IOS4. I have more of a reason to trust my ISP, University and Public Access Unix System that I do Gmail or Facebook. While they both claim to be “free,” Google and Facebook aren’t. They are trying to sell, rent, bargain or barter everything that can be disclosed about you and your friends.
Meh, I’m not on board with this whole Facebook thing. I don’t understand all the hype. Facebook isn’t that great.
I agree with MacSmiley and Jimmy. Why should we share everything so that mr. Mark Zuckerberg can cash-in on all that. I hope that this idea of his tanks so that our privacy is safe for types like mr. Zuckerberg. Sharing is good if the user can decide and control what to whom and when and NOT big companies like Facebook, Microsoft or Apple. Great written article though.
I totally agree with MacSmiley – given how little respect FaceBook appears to have for the privacy of its users, I don’t think I would be happy to give it access to my email – besides which they are quite enough of a monopoly as things are.
I totally resent Facebook’s intrusion into private communications with non-members. It’s getting harder and harder to avoid this privacy steam-roller!!