Today Facebook announced their new Seamless Messaging system via live broadcast on their Facebook page.
This new system is very innovative. It has great potential but some may be leary with privacy concerns or confusion of usage. Essentially the Seamless Messaging combines email, sms/text and instant messages into one @facebook.com social profile inbox. Incoming messages go to into one of three in-boxes: Inbox, Other Messages and Spam. The recipient sets up each senders priority – determining which box the message will go to. This is what Facebook calls a “Social Graph”.
One point made was that some people use Facebook casually and doesn’t want all of their friends to have the ability to send them a message that may be emailed or texted. You can disable this feature and opt out of text messages by removing your cellphone number from your profile. On the other hand, if you are trying to send a message that will be texted and their feature is disabled, you have the option to invite them to use the feature.
With your conversation threads you can forward messages, add or delete users to a thread and also choose to keep, archive or permanently delete messages. Facebook says the layout of this new system is just like Facebook, so users can adapt quickly; Advertisements will also appear the same. They did not give a specific storage limit for each user and said that if used appropriately users will not meet their threshold.
A few negative points: there is currently no imap or voip support – which was designed on purpose this way – they may come in the future. A member of the press asked a question about privacy – If John Doe uses this service and Jane Doe does not, then Jane’s information is imported into John’s inbox – how is Facebook going to use all of this new data? The Facebook people gracefully answered this question by not answering the question and dodged a bullet. One thing for users to keep in mind! Another downside is that if you prioritize your Mom to your primary inbox and she emails you several times a day about some important things and forwarded joke emails, all of these messages will go into one thread from your Mom…. big downside!
If you opt in your new @facebook.com email address, it will match your current facebook username. Facebook employees will no longer be @facebook.com, but @fb.com (they made a deal with the Farm Bureau to get this). I also noticed that www.fb.com is now the same as www.facebook.com – good domain name score on their part!
This system will be available to a few thousand users now and will slowly be available to more people over the next few months. Today they will also release an iPhone app update to support the new Seamless Messaging.
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Interesting… I was wondering if you were going to let us know what is up
how can i disable new messaging system nad back to older system ?
To my knowledge there is not a way to disable the new messaging. The research tells me that facebook did this to gain @facebook.com email address users so there won’t be a way to revert back.
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