Facebook Launches One Hub to Message Them All
ADOTAS – I had a weird sense of deja vu during the Facebook announcement of its revamped messaging system as a few of the features were similar to AOL’s new email app released on Sunday, including a conversation history feature and the ability to easily rotate between emailing, SMS or instant messaging.
And frankly — I can’t believe I’m saying this — AOL’s design with its preview pane on the right looked a lot nicer. As AOL eventually plans to integrate messaging from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, I found myself much more intrigued by Project Phoenix — perhaps AOL could rise from the ashes after all.
Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was pretty adamant that Facebook’s new messaging service is not a replacement for email. It’s more like “Google Wave Lite,” as numerous Tweeters pointed out — a unified, real-time messaging system across multiple mediums such as SMS, instant messages, emails and so forth.
Facebook is slowly rolling out the feature to users, which includes an @facebook.com email address and the social inbox: messages from your friends appear front and center while those from people you don’t know go to an other folder. Does that not sound a lot like Gmail’s priority mailbox? In addition, with Facebook’s revamped messaging system, you can block users from sending you messages.
Gotta say, I’m not getting majorly excited here.
Wave did not work for Google, and I’m less convinced it will work for Facebook. The social network strives to be at the center of your communication with all your contacts, but its privacy track record and tendency to cut corners in that regard are bound to keep people specious.
But Mike Lazerow, president and cofounder of Buddy Media, makes the point that the new messaging service will increase interaction on Facebook and encourage users to spend more time on the social network.
“Facebook has the opportunity to make email, or more importantly personal communication, very relevant again by categorizing communication by closeness — family, company, networks, etc., and combining all forms of online messaging,” Lazerow says. “By creating seamless integration across chat, IM and email and making it easier to have conversations within the Facebook eco-system, Facebook will grow the number of daily interactions among its users well beyond 4 billion.”
In addition, Patrick Toland, general manager of North America for TBG Digital, notes that the new messaging system will make Facebook an even more important location for brands.
“This latest product will further erode the display advertising market share of online companies such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN and place Facebook in a direct competition with Google as the most important media property on the Internet,” he says.
Still the main goal of the messaging system seems to be amalgamate all types of messaging into conversations. But emails, in particular, are different than conversations — I don’t think the Facebook crew ever has or ever will understand the value of email. If it was 100 years earlier, I bet Zuck would be shocked that people were still sending letters when there were these new-fangled telephones.
I’ll say it again — compartmentalization in the socialized Internet is undervalued. People enjoy keeping their messaging mediums separate — a single dashboard to control them all, powered by a company whose trustworthiness is questionable at best, may prove unappealing. Some have suggested that Facebook’s messaging hub is a solution for a non-existent problem — I think I’ve fallen in their camp.
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