Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox

"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. &#60;snip&#62; With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder."<p>This sounds utterly retarded.<p>Which is more important to me - an email from ISP or phone company telling me I have a bill to pay, or an IM from a friend asking how my vacation was? Some of the most important emails I've ever received have been from people I wasn't previously acquainted with.<p>It's as if Facebook are trying to train people to spend all there time interacting with other Facebook members, doing Facebook-type activities. Everything else be damned.

I would really like a service that did the following<p>1. People can message me in a way that no more difficult than now.<p>2. That message will be sent to me via whatever communication method is best for me at that moment.<p>3. This choice of communication method is transparent to the sender of the message.<p>4. All messages, no matter the communication methods, are accessible online in one place.<p>5. It should not require me (or anyone I communicate with) to sign up for any services they don't already use.<p>Use cases:<p>1. I get an IM, but I'm not at my computer. I want to be notified of the IM (likely on my phone) and be able to reply to it from there. This is transparent to the original sender.<p>2. I get a text message, and I want to reply, but my reply will be long and I don't feel like typing it out on my phone, so I reply via some service online. The original sender gets a text in reply.<p>3. I have IM at work, but a friend only has access to email. We communicate back and forth, him via email and me via IM. It is transparent from both sides.<p>Maybe I am projecting, but it sounds like this is in the ballpark of what Project Titan is going to do. I am sure there are other services that do this (hell, I could write an alpha of it in not that much time), but such is life.<p>PS I believe that an important distinction between this and Wave is that Wave was trying to replace other communication methods, while this is trying to unify them.

I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook is the sort of trustworthy company you would want as an intermediary for all your communications.

What I find most interesting in all of this is how they're positioning the product. From what I understand they're not targeting die hard email users, they are targeting a much younger demographic, probably ideally around age 17 and heading off to University.<p>A system that will keep someone who has never been away from home in touch with their family, their old friends and their new friends - something to make them feel more in touch and connected. Basically target the demographic that Facebook was originally built for.<p>Google tried a similar messaging system, as many suggest (Wave), but they positioned it for the enterprise/business customer. Perhaps the wrong demographic, maybe Facebook gets it right?

Request your invite at this page: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/</a><p>Your email address will match your public username, for example:<p>Profile: facebook.com/username<p>Email: username@facebook.com

Sort of interesting that google and facebook are trying (or have tried) to rethink our messaging concepts. Are they trying to fix something that isn't broken? Sometimes I think it needs work but it seems like they are trying whole new ideas that may or may not work.

from the article Many are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase (working alongside the open source community again)<p>Someone knows what this means? Did they switch to hbase the _existing for many years_ database solution, or did they build something else on top of it (is there a trace of this in the hbase community?) or did they build something else from scratch and incredibly hit on the same name?<p>I wish techcrunch was a bit less.. techcrunch...

So when everyone was expecting them to compete with Gmail, they've gone and imitated... Goggle Wave?

<i>People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase...</i><p>As in Apache HBase? Not to be too pedantic, but that's not really something that Facebook "built". I'm assuming that was an error on TC's part.

Google has all the pieces to do this even better than Facebook. I look forward to seeing what they can do with GMail, Google Chat, and Google Voice.

It seems that Facebook are trying to extend their information base by capturing information on people that are not using Facebook and their relationship with Facebook users.<p>Some similar conceptual underpinnings to Google Wave but I wonder how practical it will be to have your entire history of communication with a person stored in a single thread.<p>Underwhelmed and the majority of the questions were related to the privacy concerns (dismissed by Zuckerberg) that this product throws up.

And FB's blog post on this: <a href="https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130" rel="nofollow">https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130</a>

I have not heard anything regarding how they expect to open Facebook to external communications without bringing in spam.

Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of took the user stories and simplified them but...<p>I don't see how this is different than anything Yahoo did 4-5 years ago. From the standpoint of using their IM app, things are forwarded to email or SMS depending on what the user wants. If you're in the webmail app similar options are provided. They also had a sort of seamless SMS from their webmail client a long time ago. I'm not sure what I'd call it, Intermodal Communication? How is what Facebook is doing here any different than the Yahoo model?

Interesting that they bailed on Cassandra and went back to HBase.

This is interesting. On one hand Facebook doesn't try to attempt to satisfy the email crowd (imagine Blackberry and corporate firewalls), on the other hand, they are looking squarely at the SMS crowd (imagine teens who send 500+ sms a month, and complain $10 a month for the privilege is too much).<p>The scale is much larger and the requirements less stringent, yet the market is ripe to be pried apart, as most sms providers and telcos are basically milking it.

This sounds super for Facebook users, but does this entice any Non-Facebook users? Are they doing anything to capture the people who don't see value in it?

Interesting question to people in our space: When will facebook become "the internet" for non-technical people?

Oh boy, never heard so many buzz words in one single article. Did anyone make out what it really is?

Give facebook even more credentials.<p>also, this is very similar to yahoo mail year-old inbox (you can read social feeds from pretty much anywhere... flickr, twitter, etc, etc)