

Why Private Messages Suck - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/09/16/why-private-messages-suck/

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cstejerean
I'd say the reason private messages are used (and the reason everyone wants to
reinvent the wheel for their social networking site) is that it is more
convenient to send a message to someone directly from the site you are using
when you see their name or profile than to switch over to your mail client and
fire up an email. Also keep in mind that a lot of the target audience of sites
like Facebook are on university run email servers which generally have a less
than pretty user interface.

I would like to see more systems however allow you to view the message in the
email and allow you to respond by hitting reply.

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rms
As a university student who regular communicates using facebook messages
instead of email, I can say that in the current culture email is seen as
overly former. I use it when I'm communicating about classwork, but for
anything social, email is almost inappropriate.

I realize it's kind of ridiculous, but it's how it is and everyone I know
checks their facebook account just as much if not more than their their email
inbox anyways. As you said, it doesn't help that Pitt has a terrible web-based
email UI.

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Zak
It seems to me that the best thing (for the user) would be to allow forwarding
of Facebook messages to an arbitrary email account. I really don't get the
'email is dead' thing though. Recently, somebody trying to contact me asked a
mutual friend for my Myspace page (I don't have one) instead of my email,
phone or IM information.

It wouldn't bother me much if these systems were open. I wouldn't mind having
a social-networking ID if I could interact with other services instead of
having to log in to each one. I have one mail client and one Jabber client. I
could use them to connect to a thousand accounts each, and users of tens of
thousands of other providers can interact with those accounts. Oops... this
just turned in to a rambling rant.

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karzeem
Exactly. The social networks' messaging systems are convenient front ends, but
there's no reason that they can't all share data.

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rms
I'm sure open access to facebook messaging will come eventually. There's no
rush because facebook is the market leader and most people don't realize there
is something wrong with having to log into facebook to reply to messages.

~~~
Zak
The problem is other people having to have a facebook (or myspace, etc...)
account to _receive_ messages from you. Half the people I want to talk to have
facebook, almost half have myspace, a few have both, a few have some other
social networking service and a few have none. They all have email, and most
of them don't consider it outdated.

I realize I don't have much in common with the average high-school/college
student, but I suspect many of them get annoyed with this multi-network
situation too. Inter-network personal messaging is a solved problem - RFC 821
came out in _1982_.

------
Goladus
_which you check 144 times per day assuming you use Gmail_

Which is probably not a good assumption to make. Tons of people are using
gmail, or hotmail or some other email with a web interface, but it's not
everyone. So long as facebook messages can be checked from any computer,
versus email which is usually checked from home, people will still use both.

