One thing I heard about the young generation is that they never use email anymore. I began to wonder why that was, where corporate America and us old folks who grew up with nothing but email couldn’t live without email now.
Lately, I started trading messages with people on Facebook through their messaging system. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. Some people began sending me messages while I would initiate some just for kicks. It seemed like a novelty more than something that was useful.
But I started recognizing the advantages of messaging like this:
1. Email is filled with spam. Yet, Facebook messaging is not. I guess spammers haven’t figured out good ways of getting into the messaging system. Each time you create an identity on Facebook, there are verification steps to show that you are a real person. Once someone creates a fake identity for spam purposes, it’s pretty obvious, even if you get past the verification steps. They often have a big link posted to their website and I immediately report them as inappropriate to Facebook authorities. I once met Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, who tossed out the idea of using a social network as an email system, because it would effectively eliminate spam. I think he was right.
2. It sorts emails by the conversation. It presents each message thread, which is incredibly useful from a conversation standpoint. In Outlook and other email programs, somehow the sorting by sender or subject doesn’t solve the entire problem. It doesn’t do auto-grouping by conversation, which I am finding to be very useful in a Facebook GUI; subject sorting just doesn’t cut it. And last, threading never seems to work well, because sometimes attempting to derive threading via the RE: of a message subject can be daunting, especially if it has been editted.
3. Going further, the presentation of each conversation once you click into it is very nice. There is no antiquated ‘>>’ for presenting the previous body of the message into replied email, which can make for difficult reading. You can see the whole thread at once and see where people replied. I do wish I had the option of copying some of the previous message into my current message. Sometimes there are multiple points in a message and you want to reply to each one separately and clearly. I have cut-pasted message sections into a new message and then typed a reply to that, just so the recipient knew I was talking about that section of a message and not another part.
4. If you want to start a new topic, you can just start a new message thread. This helps keep conversations organized instead of devolving from the original message where you may forget to change the message subject or just too lazy to, and then the conversation starts going every which way.
4. You can only receive messages from friends. Thus, you have already designated a list of safe message senders, which along with item 1. above helps to eliminate spam.
5. Private messaging is available, but you can also do public messaging. This is not available to the email world. Via the wall, you can have a more public conversation which can be entertaining and/or useful, if you intend on others to see it.
6. There are many types of communication happening on Facebook. People can comment on your photos, write on your wall, have activity and you get notified of it, and send you personal messages. Having all that accessible in one place is very useful. Otherwise, I’d have to flip between Outlook and several other websites to check activity. Sometimes I can send activity to my email, but then it just gets mixed in with all the other spam and normal important conversations I’m having. It’s not very optimal. On Facebook, the newsfeed gives it to me all and a light notification on the front page gathers for me all the communications one can have with their friends and community in one convenient place. It’s no wonder that people today have switched to Facebook from email as a primary communications vehicle.
The moment of epiphany for me happened when I began my Facebook messaging to friends AND I left a browser window up with Facebook in it. I would find myself hitting reload on that page many times during the day as well as checking on Facebook through my iPhone. I began to understand why today’s youth almost never use email and just use Facebook messaging.
As my usage of Facebook messaging grew, I could also see parallels with another project I’ve been deeply interested in, which is email innovation. Facebook messaging solves so many things that I hate about current email. But could email innovation just be a dying concept as email gets supplanted by Facebook messaging?
Four wishlist items for Facebook messaging:
1. Offline messaging.
2. Save messages and conversation threads on my hard drive.
3. SMS messaging.
4. File sending.
Still, I do not see myself totally removing myself from email. The corporate world, and most of my generation, still use email as a primary communication vehicle. But for a significant and growing population of people I associate with, Facebook will become my primary communications method with them.