

Facebook's Announcement – it's email. [live] - jankassens
http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/

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yarapavan
All programs evolve until they can send email.... even Facebook.

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Terretta
It's not email. The audience question and the answer about jokes from your Mom
clarify:

This is person-to-person conversations.

The concept is that all communication between you and one other individual is
an ordered sequence, regardless of the channel. This aggregates all channels
into one person-to-person timeline.

The biggest issue I see with it is uncertain latency. Email is low latency,
SMS medium, and IM high. With the demo today, it's not clear how you can know
when to expect someone to respond.

Their example of leaving an IM w/o having to say "brb", and seeing the
notification on the phone, is great for the receiver, but not so great for the
sender, who doesn't know why latency just went through the roof.

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swaits
Email is low and IM is high latency? Seems backwards.

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Terretta
Sorry, I'd written something else and edited, and didn't fix those.

Yes, you're right, of course. I meant email is high latency, SMS medium
latency, and IM low latency.

In an earlier edit I'd used the word urgency, as in IM is high urgency.

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xcombinator
When a company gets a lot of market, they want to differentiate their products
so people stop using the standard and gets locked into their "standard
slightly modified".

No no no, It is not an MP3 player(anyone could make an MP3 player), is an
Ipod.

No no no, It is not email, email is an standard and we don't want to have to
compete with other companies on a levered field, it is the facebook messaging
event.

As usual they will make it very easy for people to get in, not so easy to get
out.

"I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like
Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with
the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to
meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer
practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea."

I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video)
in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against
you by other people. Bad things could happen when you can't control it(friends
of friends could see that)like you could control on gmail.

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ajays
"I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and
video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used
against you by other people."

It seems you don't have a girlfriend... ;-)

Having dispatched of that softie: IMHO, too much history is a bad thing.
Sometimes one _needs_ to forget stuff from the past before one can move on.

A prime example of too much history is the Middle East, more specifically,
Israel-Palestine.

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ajays
To me this sounds a lot like Google Wave.

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kylec
Really? It sounded nothing like Google Wave to me, but I will readily admit
that I really didn't know what Google Wave _was_. This just sounds like a
system where people choose how they send you a message and you can choose how
you receive it, using Facebook as the intermediary.

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bOR_
trying to understand the stream. Facebook emails' biggest feature is similar
to gmails priority inbox?

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bentruyman
It's not email. <http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging-event/>

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tseabrooks
Saying "It's not email" doesn't make it true.

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nollidge
Quoth the Zuck: "This is not e-mail... We don't think that a modern messaging
system is going to be e-mail."

Source: <http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/15/technology/facebook_email/>

EDIT: Although reading further, it looks like they will be offering
@facebook.com addresses.

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sidek
Yes, it seems like email with capability to interact with SMS and a few other
things.

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Sizlak
The problem is that this is private communication and I don't trust Facebook
to do private communication well. I don't trust that my drunk email to an ex
girlfriend won't somehow be accessible by someone else, so I won't use it. I'm
sure a lot of other people will though.

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joe_the_user
Hmm,

It's not a good sign if the main thing people take away from a presentation is
_"This is not X"_.

It doesn't sound like it's as terrible an idea as "Wave" but since messaging
is much more core to Facebook, a confused and barely successful product could
hurt Facebook more than Wave hurt Google. But perhaps I'm letting my biases
creep in.

Aggregating electronic communication protocols is great - it is going to come.
But I don't that a single aggregation process is going to do for everyone any
more than a single messaging system would work for everyone (disclaimer: I'm
working on a protocol aggregating project myself). Like computer to computer
protocols, person to protocols vary in their speed, their richness, their
reliability and their latency. And appropriately so. Tying them together into
a meta-protocols is great but any effort to create a _single_ meta-protocol
which "solves" _all_ the speed, richness, reliability and latency problems
results in a "monstrosity" which solves none of the problems.

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joe_the_user
So this is going to be aggregating all communication in Facebook?

Sounds great - the problem is that it's Facebook arguing they should be able
to do the aggregating but will take active steps to stop anyone else from
doing said aggregating (say, suing companies that combine multiple social
networking streams).

