
Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox - hiteshiitk
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/
======
ajg1977
"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched
between a bill and a bank statement. <snip> With new Messages, your Inbox will
only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages
will go into an Other folder."

This sounds utterly retarded.

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.

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.

~~~
smokinn
You pay bills?

Bills are going the way of the fax machine. They'll probably always be around
but for most people dealing with a bill will elicit a reaction of the "A fax?
Why don't you just send it over on a dinosaur?" variety.

I don't know anyone in their 20s that hasn't automated almost every payment.
(For some reason the electric company won't allow me to, they're the only ones
that still send me bills.) Most of my stuff goes onto my credit card and my
credit card pays itself out of my bank account. I just need to log in
periodically and look at statements to make sure no one is screwing me over.

I don't want my personal inbox cluttered with crap like bills. The sooner we
get rid of that stuff the better.

Caveat: That was all on a personal level. If you're running a business your
inbox preferences change dramatically and that's ok. We don't to force
everyone into a lowest-common-denominator middle ground.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
This is a convenience for those who don't live paycheck to paycheck. Many
families, myself included, are, at times, forced to pick and choose what to
pay on time and what is going to have wait a week or two. Living beyond my
means? Perhaps, but I'm hardly the minority.

~~~
marquis
That's a great point you make. Why can't your electric/phone/water company
allow you to make those choices online? After all, they want you to pay the
bill, but they'll take 'at some point soon' rather than immediately, over
never.

------
gfunk911
I would really like a service that did the following

1\. People can message me in a way that no more difficult than now.

2\. That message will be sent to me via whatever communication method is best
for me at that moment.

3\. This choice of communication method is transparent to the sender of the
message.

4\. All messages, no matter the communication methods, are accessible online
in one place.

5\. It should not require me (or anyone I communicate with) to sign up for any
services they don't already use.

Use cases:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
RK
That's not terribly different than gmail (which has integrated google talk) +
an adroid phone.

~~~
mikedanko
The only thing with gmail is that it's a pain to deal with between
Voice/IM/GTalk, it's far from unified and you can't use it like normal GMail
users if you're GAFYD. Google talk supports the whole email sort of exchange,
but only after a conversation has been initiated and there are no more paths
for the jabber transports to take.

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

------
mattwdelong
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.

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.

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?

~~~
joe_the_user
There's delicate balancing act involved in deciding how much interaction and
how much commitment you want to have and to allow on a social networking site.

Targeting, youth, a group happy to send each a hundred messages a day, can
keep others away from you (and I suspect that there's point where the even
youth "graduate" out of the ultra-social-ness involved in making a hundred
messages a day).

I think Facebook succeed by being something you don't have to use much. I
joined Facebook at much for the contacts who almost never use Facebook as for
the people who are always on it. The thing is that the people who are always
on Facebook can actually drive the light-users off.

Facebook now filters people's post so you don't notice the hundred-posts-a-
day-guy. But Facebook won't be able to filter messages similarly because both
send then receiver need some way to be sure important messages get through.
(hmm, it occurs to me Facebook was able to dodge "The Spam Question" earlier
but now it's bitten off this big problem - ie, the problem of deciding what's
a real, important message from someone across the world from you - something
non-teenagers have to deal with semi-regularly).

------
yarapavan
Request your invite at this page: <http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/>

Your email address will match your public username, for example:

Profile: facebook.com/username

Email: username@facebook.com

~~~
rospaya
Spammers rejoice.

~~~
iampims
I thought only emails from friends and their friends was actually displayed in
your inbox. How would spammer abuse this?

~~~
smackfu
In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from
non-contacts.

~~~
anamax
> In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from
> non-contacts.

Bouncing is an interesting choice. Many/most of the large e-mail providers
stopped bouncing several years ago. (Instead, they just drop the message.)
Many/most companies do the same thing.

Any idea why facebook went the other way?

------
zitterbewegung
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.

~~~
zacharycohn
Keep in mind email wasn't "broken" when everyone was using Outlook, and then
Gmail came along.

~~~
seiji
Email was better before Outlook.

Outlook brought us: ubiquitous top posting, lack of signature delimiters,
ubiquitous email-as-microsoft-word-documents, multi-megabyte email threads
where every new email includes every previous email, and viruworms.

It's not really a "and then Gmail came along" issue either. My numbers from
yesterday (about 250k messages total):

    
    
      40% - yahoo.com
      18% - hotmail.com
      17% - gmail.com
       4% - live.com
       3% - aol.com
        - - Other

~~~
tseabrooks
I see numbers like this often and they make me wonder how active these various
users are. I have a few old hotmail accounts and a couple old yahoo accounts..
3 of which I know are still active... But I check those addresses annually and
they mostly exist to handle my spam.

Is Yahoo's 40% active people? When was the last time they checked their email?
Do those people check their email via pop? What is the volume of _useful_
communications for the users of these various systems.

Do your numbers above represent addresses you've collected or just a rehash of
the general numbers on the topic? Is there any way to get more fine grained
details about these various suer groups?

------
riffraff
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)

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?

I wish techcrunch was a bit less.. techcrunch...

~~~
agazso
It is not a new system, it is an already existing technology called Apache
HBase that is part of the Hadoop ecosystem.

Here is a video from the recent Hadoop World conference, where Jonathan Gray
from Facebook speaks about their experiences with HBase:

<http://vimeo.com/16350544>

~~~
riffraff
yup I know what hbase is, we used it at my previous job (but I recall stuff
like "reimplementation of hbase in bash"[1] being insightful, it was not a
great experience though I'm sure it matured a lot by now)

Thanks a lot for the conference video, but even this mostly describes their
"well known" scribe/log analysis infrastructure, and does not get into how the
new stuff gets integrated with hbase.

[1] <http://pastebin.com/f64fc84a9>

------
ajg1977
So when everyone was expecting them to compete with Gmail, they've gone and
imitated... Goggle Wave?

~~~
hiteshiitk
By what way, do you think it is an imitation of Google Wave? Please elaborate.

~~~
swaits
My question too. I don't get the comparison to Wave.

~~~
jasonlotito
At it's core, Wave was trying to attempt the same basic thing: bringing
together all your communication into a single pipeline. Facebook is doing that
exactly same thing. The difference here is that they are polishing the UI and
the backend is incomplete, whereas Wave's backend was fairly complex and the
UI (merely the client) was more a technology preview then the actual
technology.

Aside: Google's Wave UI really was just a technology preview. It wasn't the
product. People are confused by this (and rightly so), but it's not what made
Wave awesome. The UI was merely what was added on top of the protocol so they
had something they could show to the press.

Google failed Wave in that it made it out to be a different product. People
confused Google Wave the UI with Google Wave the protocol.

Basically, Google should have made Wave apart of Gmail like Facebook is doing
by making their messaging system apart of the default UI people are already
used to.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I don't understand... you're saying Google Wave wasn't Google Wave? Google
Wave is actually a product that brings communications together, but Google
Wave wasn't Google Wave, Google Wave was just a technology preview?

How exactly did you find out about Google Wave and how it differs so much from
Google Wave?

~~~
jasonlotito
I'm going to assume your not just being purposely obtuse and actually curious.

Google Wave was two things: a protocol and a UI. The UI was merely a way to
preview the protocol. The protocol was awesome, the UI not so much. People
made the assumption that the UI was what Google was pushing, when the reality
was, the UI was merely a way to demonstrate the protocol. Unfortunately, both
the UI and the protocol shared the same name.

Hopefully you understand the difference now. =)

~~~
erikpukinskis
I understand the distinction between the protocol and the product, but neither
was "bringing together all your communication into a single pipeline". That's
your wishful thinking about where they could've taken the product, and
something they never showed any intention of doing. All the protocol really
does is offer a way to do concurrent realtime editing of documents.

~~~
jasonlotito
No, it was far more than that. Real time document collaboration was a small
part. Real time chatting was another big part. Comment tracking on blogs.
Watch the demo again and you'll see. If you think it was just document editing
you are mistaken.

------
AndrewO
_People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built
something new called hBase..._

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.

~~~
megrimlock
Media is most appealing when it seduces the reader into a sense of insight.

Obvious errors in reporting on familiar areas pierces this illusion, and makes
one wonder how accurate coverage is of other areas.

------
kylec
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.

~~~
NZ_Matt
Google doesn't have the social graph that Facebook does.

~~~
kylec
Perhaps not, but they do have the priority inbox feature that works nearly as
well once it's been trained.

~~~
flyt
Who has time to train their own inbox?

~~~
kylec
Who has time to add their social graph to Facebook? If it's important to you,
you'll find the time to do it.

------
necolas
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.

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.

Underwhelmed and the majority of the questions were related to the privacy
concerns (dismissed by Zuckerberg) that this product throws up.

~~~
RK
_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._

I already get emails from facebook saying so-and-so wants you to sign up, plus
the following other people, revealing part of my social network that facebook
already knows about even though I don't have an account.

Emailing with facebook mail users will just make things worse...

------
yarapavan
And FB's blog post on this:
<https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130>

~~~
yarapavan
FAQ page is also up: <http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages>

~~~
high5ths
Some amusing things in that FAQ. For example:

    
    
         How do I stop receiving emails each time someone sends a new message?
         To stop receiving email notifications about new messages, go to the Notifications tab of your Account Settings page.
    
         To stop receiving email notifications about new messages from your group conversations, simply leave that conversation.
    

Then, "leave that conversation" links to this question/"answer":

    
    
         Is there a way to get out of a message thread once I’ve been looped in?
         At this time, there is no way to stop receiving messages once you are a part of a thread. You can encourage your friends to send an individual reply, instead of "Send To All."

~~~
alsocasey
It's both amusing and terribly depressing that in attempting to "fix" email as
a form of communication, Facebook engineers somehow failed to address the
ongoing issue of "reply-all".

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

~~~
drusenko
It seems they are only going to be highlighting messages from your friends.

Spam messages naturally won't be from your extended social graph, so will be
hidden and only show up in "Other" (if they aren't already spam-filtered away
into oblivion).

------
mikedanko
Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of
took the user stories and simplified them but...

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?

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

~~~
benatkin
Where, and in what context did you hear that? What I saw of the announcement
(the blog post and a small part of the presentation) didn't seem very
technical. Was this in response to a question someone asked or did someone
take time at the event to talk infrastructure?

~~~
atlbeer
The presentation explicitly said they opted not to use Cassandra and are using
hBase as the storage engine for this project.

------
kuahyeow
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).

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.

------
mikedanko
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?

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

~~~
scorpion032
Last year :)

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

~~~
gloob
A revolutionary new product that will allow one person to send a char[] to
another person.

------
gcb
Give facebook even more credentials.

also, this is very similar to yahoo mail year-old inbox (you can read social
feeds from pretty much anywhere... flickr, twitter, etc, etc)

