Facebook me
I’m not sure if its part of a wider rollout or if i just got lucky to be the next on the list but I got access to the new facebook messages today.
The biggest thing that threw me off at first was the fact that the newest message was at the bottom when up until now it was the other way around. My first instinct was that this was horrible and that it was going to confuse the hell out of the Moms and grandmas that facebook is really hoping this catches on with.
But after I started playing with it and actually send a message I immediately got it.
This is about so much more then just having keithmancuso@facebook.com, this really is about combining “IMs” with email into one stream. And I think it works.
What I haven’t quite figured out is the text messaging thing, but maybe once more of my friends upgrade it will start making sense but I am not sure why i had to put my phone number into this.
The biggest feature however is that facebook messages has the best spam filter ever, where any message from anyone who isnt your facebook friend is automatically “spam”. This turns traditional spam filtering on its head, where the strategy used to be to flag messages that come in as junk, removing them from your inbox. Facebook messages requires you to approve senders to promote them to your inbox either by being facebook friends with them or by promoting their email addresses.
Theres still a lot of unanswered questions for me, IE will people be able to send a text to my facebook? will they use my same phone number to do that? What about text messages I send from my phone to my friends outside of facebook? will they show up here?
I’m going to try a little experiment and forward my gmail to facebook for a week (Starting today) and see how it goes, is this a better experience, will i give up gmail for good?
