Facebook’s New Message Tools: Flip or Flop?

Image via CrunchBase

I don’t intend to answer here whether Facebook‘s latest announced feature — which, in case you didn’t hear, involves beefing up their message system so that it resembles more like a webmail, but with some added features — will be a success or a failure. There is no way I could do that without interacting first-hand with these functions, and it seems it will be a while until I’ll get my hands on an invite (judging by how quickly I got an invite for Google Wave, it’ll probably be a month or so).

Nor will I go through all the features announced. There is an over-saturation of journalistic blog posts on the subject, and I don’t intend to add to it. If you missed the news, you can begin here.

However, I did want to share some thoughts that immediately came up. I’m sure the Facebook crew gave thought to all these issues, but I don’t believe they were addressed in the press announcement, so here we go:

First off, let’s all agree to lay off of the simplistic “GMail killer”-type headlines. Yes, I also believe Facebook would love to dominate e-mail, but in technology, especially among services with such popularity, a new service or feature doesn’t just kill off another so simply. It usually takes a long road of adoption for one service to dominate, and who knows if that will happen anyway.

The features mentioned will try to integrate what Facebook does best into private messaging, which is capitalizing on their social graph to make conversations more relevant, cut through the clutter, and so on. When they heard that, there were complete armies of “e-mail marketers” pooping in their pants.

Facebook says their messages will include attachment capabilities. GMail currently offers 7.5MB worth of space for their free accounts. Will Facebook want to compete in that area?

The sinister side: Facebook’s new messages will allow you to message beyond Facebook users, directly to e-mail addresses. These addresses may or may not belong to Facebook users. What does Facebook intend to do with all these e-mail addresses? Sneaky, sneaky…

Currently through their message system I get all sorts of notification I’m not interested in, like invitations for events occurring many miles away from where I live, Page updates, etc.. I’ve always understood these as sort of the cost of being on Facebook, you get a bit of everything. Now they want you give you the ability to filter every message you receive into three nifty boxes: Friends, Other, and Spam. It makes sense that Facebook would want me to make this filtering from within their platform, and not in the external e-mail system I use (GMail).

On that subject, they also mentioned that they will join all communication, whether e-mail, SMS, IMs, etc., into one long conversation history. So does this mean I’ll get people’s FarmVille notifications in the same thread as other meaningful conversations? I’m not sure if this will be so, but if it is I think this is an oversimplification of how people communicate.

Anyway, there is a lot we won’t understand about these new features until we fool around with them. People have been pushing the rumors and hype about this for a while, which undoubtedly will result in many disappointed users. Others will probably feel it’s a welcome development. Time will only tell.

The only thing I will say is that e-mail as it is — even with all the coolness that GMail has added to it — is a truly archaic communication platform that is bound to evolve one way or another. Of course, its effectiveness in communication probably trumps most every other form of online communication, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an old and clunky system. I’m not sure that Facebook will be the missing link in the evolutionary process, but I’m glad that there are companies out there willing to take a second look at a platform we all take for granted.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Popularity: 6%