Facebook announced their take on “modern messaging system” of today. They announced that there are 350 million people using messaging on Facebook to message their family and friends, which amount to over 4 billion messages sent per day. Those numbers are pretty impressive, to say the least.
Facebook’s new messaging system, codenamed “Titan” is designed to seamlessly integrate and unify email, SMS, Facebook messages, and instant messaging. By combining the various ways that we electronically communicate with one another, several benefits are immediately recognized. The first benefit with the unification provides a more simplistic way to communicate. You don’t have to think about where to go to communicate with a specific person. You won’t find yourself asking the question. Does that person prefer SMS, IM, or email?
The second benefit with the unification allows you the ability to see a true history of all of the communication with this person. What you get is a continuous conversation instead of fragmented conversations through various communication mediums. Google currently offers this with their unification of email and IM and allows you to lookup your IM conversations inside of your email. And although Google offers “Conversation View” which groups your emails by subject, Facebook stated that the most common subject in a Facebook message was “Yo” or “Hi” so the grouping of messages by subject is not ideal (in Facebook messaging scenario).
Facebook has confirmed that all Facebook users will have the opportunity, but not required, to have an @facebook.com email address which is tied to your Facebook username.
By default, your inbox will have messages from only your Friends on Facebook. Everything else goes into a separate folder labeled “Other.” If a friend of yours is not on Facebook, you can set it so that person’s correspondence will go right to your inbox. In some cases if a “friend” of yours is a bit “chatty”on Facebook you can set it up so that person’s messages go to the “Other” inbox.
The gist of what Facebook is doing is to combine the methods for which people communicate and provide a means of prioritization. Important conversations go to your “Inbox” and everything else goes to “Other” inbox.
Privacy concerns? Without having the new messaging system available at this time it’s not easy to definitely state one way or another, yet. That being said, Facebook states that the receiving of email to your @facebook.com email will be tied to the “Messages” privacy setting. So if your privacy setting for “Send you messages” is set to “Friends Only” then only your Facebook Friends can email you.
How large will @facebook.com email boxes be? Facebook has not stated a specific size and claim “non-abusers” will not have a problem with reaching a limit. “Abusers” will likely hit a limit.
A few users will be invited to use the new messaging system starting today and will be rolled out to all Facebook users over the next several months. If you want to request an invite from Facebook, click here
