7 ms·

Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox

81 points by hiteshiitk 16y ago

zitterbewegung 16y ago
Sort of interesting that google and facebook are trying (or have tried) to rethink our messaging concepts. Are they trying to fix something that isn't broken? Sometimes I think it needs work but it seems like they are trying whole new ideas that may or may not work.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  Keep in mind email wasn't "broken" when everyone was using Outlook, and then Gmail came along.
  - ajg1977 16y ago
    Gmail's threading and search are awesome, but it's hardly like email clients are "broken" without them.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Ehh, I don't know. I think just as many, if not more, were using Hotmail/Yahoo Mail, or their ISP's webmail service. And in those cases, email was definitely broken. Stingy mailbox quotas (25 MB!), shitty ads, cluttered UX, on and on.
  - axod 16y ago
    You obviously have never tried "search" in outlook.
  - seiji 16y ago
    Email was better before Outlook. Outlook brought us: ubiquitous top posting, lack of signature delimiters, ubiquitous email-as-microsoft-word-documents, multi-megabyte email threads where every new email includes every previous email, and viruworms. It's not really a "and then Gmail came along" issue either. My numbers from yesterday (about 250k messages total): 40% - yahoo.com 18% - hotmail.com 17% - gmail.com 4% - live.com 3% - aol.com - - Other
    - tseabrooks 16y ago
      I see numbers like this often and they make me wonder how active these various users are. I have a few old hotmail accounts and a couple old yahoo accounts.. 3 of which I know are still active... But I check those addresses annually and they mostly exist to handle my spam. Is Yahoo's 40% active people? When was the last time they checked their email? Do those people check their email via pop? What is the volume of useful communications for the users of these various systems. Do your numbers above represent addresses you've collected or just a rehash of the general numbers on the topic? Is there any way to get more fine grained details about these various suer groups?
  - axod 16y ago
    You obviously have never tried "search" in outlook.
- finiteloop 16y ago
  The nice part of the new Facebook messages product is that it isn't a standalone or competing messaging product, unlike many other products you are alluding too. It unifies SMS, email, and IM, and it interoperates with all of them. So if your friend emails you, you can reply by SMS or by IM, and they will receive it back in their email inbox. Likewise, if your friend is online when you email them, it will pop up like an IM, so they can reply in real-time. I think this type of product has been a growing need for people for a while. Literally every single one of my younger cousins only uses SMS and IM to communicate and every single one of my older relatives uses only email, so you end up having to choose a communication protocol based on recipient rather than just choosing a person and composing a message. It still has a number of quirks, but I personally think this is a really nice product. (I am admittedly biased, but I am being honest.)
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  Email is like the horse and cart now, and these attempted solutions are the cars. Just because something isn't broken doesn't mean it can't be improved. That being said, you ask if they are trying to fix something that isn't broken. But, if you look at what they are trying to solve, it very much is broken. Email, forums, messages, comments, blog posts, SMS, etc. Communication online is disjointed and broken. A single system that can pull it all together would do a lot. It's why I was/am so hopeful about Wave.
  - axod 16y ago
    That's because all those methods achieve different things. Email is completely different to SMS, which is completely different to blog posts, forums, etc They all have totally different dynamics. A single unified system would be horrible.
    - NZ_Matt 16y ago
      SMS, Email, IM and FB messages all have similar dynamics. A unified system combining these four makes a lot of sense and wouldn't be horrible.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Email, SMS, blog posts, forums, comments here on HN: All are exactly the same thing at the core. They are all text. Some might allow images or other media. Some might allow attachments. But they are all essentially the same: all elements of a conversation or content. The only difference between them is how they are created or displayed, and that's a UI feature. You're probably making the mistake of assuming that things would have to change in your use of SMS, blog posts, forums, comments or YouTube videos to utilize a single system. That's not the case. The benefit isn't that it changes the way you do things, but that you can do more than what you do now.
      - axod 16y ago
        > " The only difference between them is how they are created or displayed, and that's a UI feature." That's incorrect IMHO. It's also completely different how people use them. If I want to ask my wife to get something extra from the shops, I won't email her. I'll SMS. Each medium carries with it 'urgency', whether you expect a response now or in the future, whether it's open for discussion in a group, etc etc These things didn't just come about by chance, they came about because users want several different methods of communication depending on what they want to say, and their expectations regarding response/discussion etc It's like saying that the internet will make books obsolete. They serve completely different purposes. To an engineer SMS/email/forums etc may be the same. But socially they're completely different.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  It depends on your point of view. According to the video on their blog post, their team thinks it's somewhat broken that you have to keep a mental lookup table in your head of the contacts in your life and the best way to reach them - who you should send a SMS to in order to get their attention, who you should email, who you should send a Facebook message, etc. They want to provide an easier and unified face for personal messaging. Personally I like the idea.
rickharrison 16y ago
Interesting question to people in our space: When will facebook become "the internet" for non-technical people?
- scorpion032 16y ago
  Last year :)
ajg1977 16y ago
So when everyone was expecting them to compete with Gmail, they've gone and imitated... Goggle Wave?
- hiteshiitk 16y ago
  By what way, do you think it is an imitation of Google Wave? Please elaborate.
  - swaits 16y ago
    My question too. I don't get the comparison to Wave.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      At it's core, Wave was trying to attempt the same basic thing: bringing together all your communication into a single pipeline. Facebook is doing that exactly same thing. The difference here is that they are polishing the UI and the backend is incomplete, whereas Wave's backend was fairly complex and the UI (merely the client) was more a technology preview then the actual technology. Aside: Google's Wave UI really was just a technology preview. It wasn't the product. People are confused by this (and rightly so), but it's not what made Wave awesome. The UI was merely what was added on top of the protocol so they had something they could show to the press. Google failed Wave in that it made it out to be a different product. People confused Google Wave the UI with Google Wave the protocol. Basically, Google should have made Wave apart of Gmail like Facebook is doing by making their messaging system apart of the default UI people are already used to.
      - erikpukinskis 16y ago
        I don't understand... you're saying Google Wave wasn't Google Wave? Google Wave is actually a product that brings communications together, but Google Wave wasn't Google Wave, Google Wave was just a technology preview? How exactly did you find out about Google Wave and how it differs so much from Google Wave?
yarapavan 16y ago
And FB's blog post on this: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130 https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130
- yarapavan 16y ago
  FAQ page is also up: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages
  - high5ths 16y ago
    Some amusing things in that FAQ. For example: How do I stop receiving emails each time someone sends a new message? To stop receiving email notifications about new messages, go to the Notifications tab of your Account Settings page. To stop receiving email notifications about new messages from your group conversations, simply leave that conversation. Then, "leave that conversation" links to this question/"answer": Is there a way to get out of a message thread once I’ve been looped in? At this time, there is no way to stop receiving messages once you are a part of a thread. You can encourage your friends to send an individual reply, instead of "Send To All."
    - alsocasey 16y ago
      It's both amusing and terribly depressing that in attempting to "fix" email as a form of communication, Facebook engineers somehow failed to address the ongoing issue of "reply-all".
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
kylec 16y ago
Google has all the pieces to do this even better than Facebook. I look forward to seeing what they can do with GMail, Google Chat, and Google Voice.
- NZ_Matt 16y ago
  Google doesn't have the social graph that Facebook does.
  - kylec 16y ago
    Perhaps not, but they do have the priority inbox feature that works nearly as well once it's been trained.
    - flyt 16y ago
      Who has time to train their own inbox?
      - kylec 16y ago
        Who has time to add their social graph to Facebook? If it's important to you, you'll find the time to do it.
      - marquis 16y ago
        My priority inbox was pretty much on the nose from the get-go. Only a few slipped by, and they were frequent mails from lists that I may have wanted prioritized anyway, as far as any computer system would know.
  - spaghetti 16y ago
    Seems like Google has a substantial "social graph" in the form of Gmail users and their contacts.
- smackfu 16y ago
  Do Google's services work if people don't have GMail accounts? That seems to be where Facebook is way ahead.
equark 16y ago
Interesting that they bailed on Cassandra and went back to HBase.
- benatkin 16y ago
  Where, and in what context did you hear that? What I saw of the announcement (the blog post and a small part of the presentation) didn't seem very technical. Was this in response to a question someone asked or did someone take time at the event to talk infrastructure?
  - atlbeer 16y ago
    The presentation explicitly said they opted not to use Cassandra and are using hBase as the storage engine for this project.
  - equark 16y ago
    http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/ >In order to make this work, “we had to completely rebuild >the infrastructure that this system is build on,” Bosworth >noted. People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but >now they’ve built something new called hBase (working >alongside the open source community again).
- groys 16y ago
  Engineering Blog post about it, including the reason for choosing hbase, http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-underlying-technology-of-messages/454991608919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-under...
mattwdelong 16y ago
What I find most interesting in all of this is how they're positioning the product. From what I understand they're not targeting die hard email users, they are targeting a much younger demographic, probably ideally around age 17 and heading off to University. A system that will keep someone who has never been away from home in touch with their family, their old friends and their new friends - something to make them feel more in touch and connected. Basically target the demographic that Facebook was originally built for. Google tried a similar messaging system, as many suggest (Wave), but they positioned it for the enterprise/business customer. Perhaps the wrong demographic, maybe Facebook gets it right?
- nickbarnwell 16y ago
  >From what I understand they're not targeting die hard email users, they are targeting a much younger demographic, probably ideally around age 17 and heading off to University. This is correct. I am the only person I can think of in my school that uses email as their primary means of contact. May have something to do with my largest customers being email addicts, but I prefer it to SMS or phone calls. >Google tried a similar messaging system, as many suggest (Wave), but they positioned it for the enterprise/business customer. Perhaps the wrong demographic, maybe Facebook gets it right? I always thought of Wave as targeted towards developers and their ilk, and were hoping for something similar to the adoption and creation of mashups that they saw with Google Maps. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any easy way to do this and the product tanked, but it was great when I used it. It didn't help that their was no way to receive notifications other than going to Wave itself; maybe something like email would've been a help...
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  There's delicate balancing act involved in deciding how much interaction and how much commitment you want to have and to allow on a social networking site. Targeting, youth, a group happy to send each a hundred messages a day, can keep others away from you (and I suspect that there's point where the even youth "graduate" out of the ultra-social-ness involved in making a hundred messages a day). I think Facebook succeed by being something you don't have to use much. I joined Facebook at much for the contacts who almost never use Facebook as for the people who are always on it. The thing is that the people who are always on Facebook can actually drive the light-users off. Facebook now filters people's post so you don't notice the hundred-posts-a-day-guy. But Facebook won't be able to filter messages similarly because both send then receiver need some way to be sure important messages get through. (hmm, it occurs to me Facebook was able to dodge "The Spam Question" earlier but now it's bitten off this big problem - ie, the problem of deciding what's a real, important message from someone across the world from you - something non-teenagers have to deal with semi-regularly).
paraschopra 16y ago
Oh boy, never heard so many buzz words in one single article. Did anyone make out what it really is?
- gloob 16y ago
  A revolutionary new product that will allow one person to send a char[] to another person.
necolas 16y ago
It seems that Facebook are trying to extend their information base by capturing information on people that are not using Facebook and their relationship with Facebook users. Some similar conceptual underpinnings to Google Wave but I wonder how practical it will be to have your entire history of communication with a person stored in a single thread. Underwhelmed and the majority of the questions were related to the privacy concerns (dismissed by Zuckerberg) that this product throws up.
- RK 16y ago
  It seems that Facebook are trying to extend their information base by capturing information on people that are not using Facebook and their relationship with Facebook users. I already get emails from facebook saying so-and-so wants you to sign up, plus the following other people, revealing part of my social network that facebook already knows about even though I don't have an account. Emailing with facebook mail users will just make things worse...
yarapavan 16y ago
Request your invite at this page: http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ Your email address will match your public username, for example: Profile: facebook.com/username Email: username@facebook.com
- rospaya 16y ago
  Spammers rejoice.
  - flyt 16y ago
    Do you have a spammer on your friend list? If not then you shouldn't see spam.
  - iampims 16y ago
    I thought only emails from friends and their friends was actually displayed in your inbox. How would spammer abuse this?
    - smackfu 16y ago
      In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from non-contacts.
      - anamax 16y ago
        > In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from non-contacts. Bouncing is an interesting choice. Many/most of the large e-mail providers stopped bouncing several years ago. (Instead, they just drop the message.) Many/most companies do the same thing. Any idea why facebook went the other way?
ajg1977 16y ago
"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. <snip> With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder." This sounds utterly retarded. Which is more important to me - an email from ISP or phone company telling me I have a bill to pay, or an IM from a friend asking how my vacation was? Some of the most important emails I've ever received have been from people I wasn't previously acquainted with. It's as if Facebook are trying to train people to spend all there time interacting with other Facebook members, doing Facebook-type activities. Everything else be damned.
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago
  Pass this bill along to 10 of your closes friends.
- raganwald 16y ago
  You aren't a teenager, are you? The interesting thing here is that if stuff like this takes off, when those teenagers grow up, they will start designing business applications that work like social media, rather than demanding that social media work like business applications. (Yes, I'm recycling my own damn old ideas: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-apparatus.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-...)
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    I suppose teenagers don't have many bills to pay. And if the teenagers are trained well enough in the meantime, they just won't bother paying their bills when the time comes.... That might be interesting but I'm sure where the successful business comes in. Now, if important messages in "other" box become visible along with the important friend messages, this might work but then its just a method of sorting. But if I'm never reminded of anything but the latest gossip from the my friends, I don't think I'll survive well outside a teenage world.
    - 16y ago
bensummers 16y ago
I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook is the sort of trustworthy company you would want as an intermediary for all your communications.
synnik 16y ago
I have not heard anything regarding how they expect to open Facebook to external communications without bringing in spam.
- drusenko 16y ago
  It seems they are only going to be highlighting messages from your friends. Spam messages naturally won't be from your extended social graph, so will be hidden and only show up in "Other" (if they aren't already spam-filtered away into oblivion).
deleted 16y ago
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gfunk911 16y ago
I would really like a service that did the following 1. People can message me in a way that no more difficult than now. 2. That message will be sent to me via whatever communication method is best for me at that moment. 3. This choice of communication method is transparent to the sender of the message. 4. All messages, no matter the communication methods, are accessible online in one place. 5. It should not require me (or anyone I communicate with) to sign up for any services they don't already use. Use cases: 1. I get an IM, but I'm not at my computer. I want to be notified of the IM (likely on my phone) and be able to reply to it from there. This is transparent to the original sender. 2. I get a text message, and I want to reply, but my reply will be long and I don't feel like typing it out on my phone, so I reply via some service online. The original sender gets a text in reply. 3. I have IM at work, but a friend only has access to email. We communicate back and forth, him via email and me via IM. It is transparent from both sides. Maybe I am projecting, but it sounds like this is in the ballpark of what Project Titan is going to do. I am sure there are other services that do this (hell, I could write an alpha of it in not that much time), but such is life. PS I believe that an important distinction between this and Wave is that Wave was trying to replace other communication methods, while this is trying to unify them.
- RK 16y ago
  That's not terribly different than gmail (which has integrated google talk) + an adroid phone.
  - mikedanko 16y ago
    The only thing with gmail is that it's a pain to deal with between Voice/IM/GTalk, it's far from unified and you can't use it like normal GMail users if you're GAFYD. Google talk supports the whole email sort of exchange, but only after a conversation has been initiated and there are no more paths for the jabber transports to take.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  This was called Google Wave. Yes, every single point.
riffraff 16y ago
from the article Many are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase (working alongside the open source community again) Someone knows what this means? Did they switch to hbase the _existing for many years_ database solution, or did they build something else on top of it (is there a trace of this in the hbase community?) or did they build something else from scratch and incredibly hit on the same name? I wish techcrunch was a bit less.. techcrunch...
- agazso 16y ago
  It is not a new system, it is an already existing technology called Apache HBase that is part of the Hadoop ecosystem. Here is a video from the recent Hadoop World conference, where Jonathan Gray from Facebook speaks about their experiences with HBase: http://vimeo.com/16350544 http://vimeo.com/16350544
  - riffraff 16y ago
    yup I know what hbase is, we used it at my previous job (but I recall stuff like "reimplementation of hbase in bash"[1] being insightful, it was not a great experience though I'm sure it matured a lot by now) Thanks a lot for the conference video, but even this mostly describes their "well known" scribe/log analysis infrastructure, and does not get into how the new stuff gets integrated with hbase. [1] http://pastebin.com/f64fc84a9 http://pastebin.com/f64fc84a9
AndrewO 16y ago
People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase... As in Apache HBase? Not to be too pedantic, but that's not really something that Facebook "built". I'm assuming that was an error on TC's part.
- megrimlock 16y ago
  Media is most appealing when it seduces the reader into a sense of insight. Obvious errors in reporting on familiar areas pierces this illusion, and makes one wonder how accurate coverage is of other areas.
deleted 16y ago
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mikedanko 16y ago
Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of took the user stories and simplified them but... I don't see how this is different than anything Yahoo did 4-5 years ago. From the standpoint of using their IM app, things are forwarded to email or SMS depending on what the user wants. If you're in the webmail app similar options are provided. They also had a sort of seamless SMS from their webmail client a long time ago. I'm not sure what I'd call it, Intermodal Communication? How is what Facebook is doing here any different than the Yahoo model?
mikedanko 16y ago
This sounds super for Facebook users, but does this entice any Non-Facebook users? Are they doing anything to capture the people who don't see value in it?
gcb 16y ago
Give facebook even more credentials. also, this is very similar to yahoo mail year-old inbox (you can read social feeds from pretty much anywhere... flickr, twitter, etc, etc)
kuahyeow 16y ago
This is interesting. On one hand Facebook doesn't try to attempt to satisfy the email crowd (imagine Blackberry and corporate firewalls), on the other hand, they are looking squarely at the SMS crowd (imagine teens who send 500+ sms a month, and complain $10 a month for the privilege is too much). The scale is much larger and the requirements less stringent, yet the market is ripe to be pried apart, as most sms providers and telcos are basically milking it.

81 points by hiteshiitk 16y ago

Sort of interesting that google and facebook are trying (or have tried) to rethink our messaging concepts. Are they trying to fix something that isn't broken? Sometimes I think it needs work but it seems like they are trying whole new ideas that may or may not work.

zacharycohn 16y ago
Keep in mind email wasn't "broken" when everyone was using Outlook, and then Gmail came along.
- ajg1977 16y ago
  Gmail's threading and search are awesome, but it's hardly like email clients are "broken" without them.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Ehh, I don't know. I think just as many, if not more, were using Hotmail/Yahoo Mail, or their ISP's webmail service. And in those cases, email was definitely broken. Stingy mailbox quotas (25 MB!), shitty ads, cluttered UX, on and on.
- axod 16y ago
  You obviously have never tried "search" in outlook.
- seiji 16y ago
  Email was better before Outlook. Outlook brought us: ubiquitous top posting, lack of signature delimiters, ubiquitous email-as-microsoft-word-documents, multi-megabyte email threads where every new email includes every previous email, and viruworms. It's not really a "and then Gmail came along" issue either. My numbers from yesterday (about 250k messages total): 40% - yahoo.com 18% - hotmail.com 17% - gmail.com 4% - live.com 3% - aol.com - - Other
  - tseabrooks 16y ago
    I see numbers like this often and they make me wonder how active these various users are. I have a few old hotmail accounts and a couple old yahoo accounts.. 3 of which I know are still active... But I check those addresses annually and they mostly exist to handle my spam. Is Yahoo's 40% active people? When was the last time they checked their email? Do those people check their email via pop? What is the volume of useful communications for the users of these various systems. Do your numbers above represent addresses you've collected or just a rehash of the general numbers on the topic? Is there any way to get more fine grained details about these various suer groups?
- axod 16y ago
  You obviously have never tried "search" in outlook.
finiteloop 16y ago
The nice part of the new Facebook messages product is that it isn't a standalone or competing messaging product, unlike many other products you are alluding too. It unifies SMS, email, and IM, and it interoperates with all of them. So if your friend emails you, you can reply by SMS or by IM, and they will receive it back in their email inbox. Likewise, if your friend is online when you email them, it will pop up like an IM, so they can reply in real-time. I think this type of product has been a growing need for people for a while. Literally every single one of my younger cousins only uses SMS and IM to communicate and every single one of my older relatives uses only email, so you end up having to choose a communication protocol based on recipient rather than just choosing a person and composing a message. It still has a number of quirks, but I personally think this is a really nice product. (I am admittedly biased, but I am being honest.)
jasonlotito 16y ago
Email is like the horse and cart now, and these attempted solutions are the cars. Just because something isn't broken doesn't mean it can't be improved. That being said, you ask if they are trying to fix something that isn't broken. But, if you look at what they are trying to solve, it very much is broken. Email, forums, messages, comments, blog posts, SMS, etc. Communication online is disjointed and broken. A single system that can pull it all together would do a lot. It's why I was/am so hopeful about Wave.
- axod 16y ago
  That's because all those methods achieve different things. Email is completely different to SMS, which is completely different to blog posts, forums, etc They all have totally different dynamics. A single unified system would be horrible.
  - NZ_Matt 16y ago
    SMS, Email, IM and FB messages all have similar dynamics. A unified system combining these four makes a lot of sense and wouldn't be horrible.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Email, SMS, blog posts, forums, comments here on HN: All are exactly the same thing at the core. They are all text. Some might allow images or other media. Some might allow attachments. But they are all essentially the same: all elements of a conversation or content. The only difference between them is how they are created or displayed, and that's a UI feature. You're probably making the mistake of assuming that things would have to change in your use of SMS, blog posts, forums, comments or YouTube videos to utilize a single system. That's not the case. The benefit isn't that it changes the way you do things, but that you can do more than what you do now.
    - axod 16y ago
      > " The only difference between them is how they are created or displayed, and that's a UI feature." That's incorrect IMHO. It's also completely different how people use them. If I want to ask my wife to get something extra from the shops, I won't email her. I'll SMS. Each medium carries with it 'urgency', whether you expect a response now or in the future, whether it's open for discussion in a group, etc etc These things didn't just come about by chance, they came about because users want several different methods of communication depending on what they want to say, and their expectations regarding response/discussion etc It's like saying that the internet will make books obsolete. They serve completely different purposes. To an engineer SMS/email/forums etc may be the same. But socially they're completely different.
brown9-2 16y ago
It depends on your point of view. According to the video on their blog post, their team thinks it's somewhat broken that you have to keep a mental lookup table in your head of the contacts in your life and the best way to reach them - who you should send a SMS to in order to get their attention, who you should email, who you should send a Facebook message, etc. They want to provide an easier and unified face for personal messaging. Personally I like the idea.

rickharrison 16y ago

Interesting question to people in our space: When will facebook become "the internet" for non-technical people?

scorpion032 16y ago
Last year :)

ajg1977 16y ago

So when everyone was expecting them to compete with Gmail, they've gone and imitated... Goggle Wave?

hiteshiitk 16y ago
By what way, do you think it is an imitation of Google Wave? Please elaborate.
- swaits 16y ago
  My question too. I don't get the comparison to Wave.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    At it's core, Wave was trying to attempt the same basic thing: bringing together all your communication into a single pipeline. Facebook is doing that exactly same thing. The difference here is that they are polishing the UI and the backend is incomplete, whereas Wave's backend was fairly complex and the UI (merely the client) was more a technology preview then the actual technology. Aside: Google's Wave UI really was just a technology preview. It wasn't the product. People are confused by this (and rightly so), but it's not what made Wave awesome. The UI was merely what was added on top of the protocol so they had something they could show to the press. Google failed Wave in that it made it out to be a different product. People confused Google Wave the UI with Google Wave the protocol. Basically, Google should have made Wave apart of Gmail like Facebook is doing by making their messaging system apart of the default UI people are already used to.
    - erikpukinskis 16y ago
      I don't understand... you're saying Google Wave wasn't Google Wave? Google Wave is actually a product that brings communications together, but Google Wave wasn't Google Wave, Google Wave was just a technology preview? How exactly did you find out about Google Wave and how it differs so much from Google Wave?

yarapavan 16y ago

And FB's blog post on this: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130 https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130

yarapavan 16y ago
FAQ page is also up: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=new_messages
- high5ths 16y ago
  Some amusing things in that FAQ. For example: How do I stop receiving emails each time someone sends a new message? To stop receiving email notifications about new messages, go to the Notifications tab of your Account Settings page. To stop receiving email notifications about new messages from your group conversations, simply leave that conversation. Then, "leave that conversation" links to this question/"answer": Is there a way to get out of a message thread once I’ve been looped in? At this time, there is no way to stop receiving messages once you are a part of a thread. You can encourage your friends to send an individual reply, instead of "Send To All."
  - alsocasey 16y ago
    It's both amusing and terribly depressing that in attempting to "fix" email as a form of communication, Facebook engineers somehow failed to address the ongoing issue of "reply-all".
deleted 16y ago
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kylec 16y ago

Google has all the pieces to do this even better than Facebook. I look forward to seeing what they can do with GMail, Google Chat, and Google Voice.

NZ_Matt 16y ago
Google doesn't have the social graph that Facebook does.
- kylec 16y ago
  Perhaps not, but they do have the priority inbox feature that works nearly as well once it's been trained.
  - flyt 16y ago
    Who has time to train their own inbox?
    - kylec 16y ago
      Who has time to add their social graph to Facebook? If it's important to you, you'll find the time to do it.
    - marquis 16y ago
      My priority inbox was pretty much on the nose from the get-go. Only a few slipped by, and they were frequent mails from lists that I may have wanted prioritized anyway, as far as any computer system would know.
- spaghetti 16y ago
  Seems like Google has a substantial "social graph" in the form of Gmail users and their contacts.
smackfu 16y ago
Do Google's services work if people don't have GMail accounts? That seems to be where Facebook is way ahead.

equark 16y ago

Interesting that they bailed on Cassandra and went back to HBase.

benatkin 16y ago
Where, and in what context did you hear that? What I saw of the announcement (the blog post and a small part of the presentation) didn't seem very technical. Was this in response to a question someone asked or did someone take time at the event to talk infrastructure?
- atlbeer 16y ago
  The presentation explicitly said they opted not to use Cassandra and are using hBase as the storage engine for this project.
- equark 16y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/ >In order to make this work, “we had to completely rebuild >the infrastructure that this system is build on,” Bosworth >noted. People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but >now they’ve built something new called hBase (working >alongside the open source community again).
groys 16y ago
Engineering Blog post about it, including the reason for choosing hbase, http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-underlying-technology-of-messages/454991608919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-under...

mattwdelong 16y ago

What I find most interesting in all of this is how they're positioning the product. From what I understand they're not targeting die hard email users, they are targeting a much younger demographic, probably ideally around age 17 and heading off to University. A system that will keep someone who has never been away from home in touch with their family, their old friends and their new friends - something to make them feel more in touch and connected. Basically target the demographic that Facebook was originally built for. Google tried a similar messaging system, as many suggest (Wave), but they positioned it for the enterprise/business customer. Perhaps the wrong demographic, maybe Facebook gets it right?

nickbarnwell 16y ago
>From what I understand they're not targeting die hard email users, they are targeting a much younger demographic, probably ideally around age 17 and heading off to University. This is correct. I am the only person I can think of in my school that uses email as their primary means of contact. May have something to do with my largest customers being email addicts, but I prefer it to SMS or phone calls. >Google tried a similar messaging system, as many suggest (Wave), but they positioned it for the enterprise/business customer. Perhaps the wrong demographic, maybe Facebook gets it right? I always thought of Wave as targeted towards developers and their ilk, and were hoping for something similar to the adoption and creation of mashups that they saw with Google Maps. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any easy way to do this and the product tanked, but it was great when I used it. It didn't help that their was no way to receive notifications other than going to Wave itself; maybe something like email would've been a help...
joe_the_user 16y ago
There's delicate balancing act involved in deciding how much interaction and how much commitment you want to have and to allow on a social networking site. Targeting, youth, a group happy to send each a hundred messages a day, can keep others away from you (and I suspect that there's point where the even youth "graduate" out of the ultra-social-ness involved in making a hundred messages a day). I think Facebook succeed by being something you don't have to use much. I joined Facebook at much for the contacts who almost never use Facebook as for the people who are always on it. The thing is that the people who are always on Facebook can actually drive the light-users off. Facebook now filters people's post so you don't notice the hundred-posts-a-day-guy. But Facebook won't be able to filter messages similarly because both send then receiver need some way to be sure important messages get through. (hmm, it occurs to me Facebook was able to dodge "The Spam Question" earlier but now it's bitten off this big problem - ie, the problem of deciding what's a real, important message from someone across the world from you - something non-teenagers have to deal with semi-regularly).

paraschopra 16y ago

Oh boy, never heard so many buzz words in one single article. Did anyone make out what it really is?

gloob 16y ago
A revolutionary new product that will allow one person to send a char[] to another person.

necolas 16y ago

It seems that Facebook are trying to extend their information base by capturing information on people that are not using Facebook and their relationship with Facebook users. Some similar conceptual underpinnings to Google Wave but I wonder how practical it will be to have your entire history of communication with a person stored in a single thread. Underwhelmed and the majority of the questions were related to the privacy concerns (dismissed by Zuckerberg) that this product throws up.

RK 16y ago
It seems that Facebook are trying to extend their information base by capturing information on people that are not using Facebook and their relationship with Facebook users. I already get emails from facebook saying so-and-so wants you to sign up, plus the following other people, revealing part of my social network that facebook already knows about even though I don't have an account. Emailing with facebook mail users will just make things worse...

yarapavan 16y ago

Request your invite at this page: http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/ Your email address will match your public username, for example: Profile: facebook.com/username Email: username@facebook.com

rospaya 16y ago
Spammers rejoice.
- flyt 16y ago
  Do you have a spammer on your friend list? If not then you shouldn't see spam.
- iampims 16y ago
  I thought only emails from friends and their friends was actually displayed in your inbox. How would spammer abuse this?
  - smackfu 16y ago
    In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from non-contacts.
    - anamax 16y ago
      > In fact, in one of the news accounts they say they will bounce emails from non-contacts. Bouncing is an interesting choice. Many/most of the large e-mail providers stopped bouncing several years ago. (Instead, they just drop the message.) Many/most companies do the same thing. Any idea why facebook went the other way?

ajg1977 16y ago

"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. <snip> With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder." This sounds utterly retarded. Which is more important to me - an email from ISP or phone company telling me I have a bill to pay, or an IM from a friend asking how my vacation was? Some of the most important emails I've ever received have been from people I wasn't previously acquainted with. It's as if Facebook are trying to train people to spend all there time interacting with other Facebook members, doing Facebook-type activities. Everything else be damned.

9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago
Pass this bill along to 10 of your closes friends.
raganwald 16y ago
You aren't a teenager, are you? The interesting thing here is that if stuff like this takes off, when those teenagers grow up, they will start designing business applications that work like social media, rather than demanding that social media work like business applications. (Yes, I'm recycling my own damn old ideas: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-apparatus.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-...)
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  I suppose teenagers don't have many bills to pay. And if the teenagers are trained well enough in the meantime, they just won't bother paying their bills when the time comes.... That might be interesting but I'm sure where the successful business comes in. Now, if important messages in "other" box become visible along with the important friend messages, this might work but then its just a method of sorting. But if I'm never reminded of anything but the latest gossip from the my friends, I don't think I'll survive well outside a teenage world.
  - 16y ago

bensummers 16y ago

I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook is the sort of trustworthy company you would want as an intermediary for all your communications.

synnik 16y ago

I have not heard anything regarding how they expect to open Facebook to external communications without bringing in spam.

drusenko 16y ago
It seems they are only going to be highlighting messages from your friends. Spam messages naturally won't be from your extended social graph, so will be hidden and only show up in "Other" (if they aren't already spam-filtered away into oblivion).

deleted 16y ago

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gfunk911 16y ago

I would really like a service that did the following 1. People can message me in a way that no more difficult than now. 2. That message will be sent to me via whatever communication method is best for me at that moment. 3. This choice of communication method is transparent to the sender of the message. 4. All messages, no matter the communication methods, are accessible online in one place. 5. It should not require me (or anyone I communicate with) to sign up for any services they don't already use. Use cases: 1. I get an IM, but I'm not at my computer. I want to be notified of the IM (likely on my phone) and be able to reply to it from there. This is transparent to the original sender. 2. I get a text message, and I want to reply, but my reply will be long and I don't feel like typing it out on my phone, so I reply via some service online. The original sender gets a text in reply. 3. I have IM at work, but a friend only has access to email. We communicate back and forth, him via email and me via IM. It is transparent from both sides. Maybe I am projecting, but it sounds like this is in the ballpark of what Project Titan is going to do. I am sure there are other services that do this (hell, I could write an alpha of it in not that much time), but such is life. PS I believe that an important distinction between this and Wave is that Wave was trying to replace other communication methods, while this is trying to unify them.

RK 16y ago
That's not terribly different than gmail (which has integrated google talk) + an adroid phone.
- mikedanko 16y ago
  The only thing with gmail is that it's a pain to deal with between Voice/IM/GTalk, it's far from unified and you can't use it like normal GMail users if you're GAFYD. Google talk supports the whole email sort of exchange, but only after a conversation has been initiated and there are no more paths for the jabber transports to take.
jasonlotito 16y ago
This was called Google Wave. Yes, every single point.

riffraff 16y ago

from the article Many are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase (working alongside the open source community again) Someone knows what this means? Did they switch to hbase the _existing for many years_ database solution, or did they build something else on top of it (is there a trace of this in the hbase community?) or did they build something else from scratch and incredibly hit on the same name? I wish techcrunch was a bit less.. techcrunch...

agazso 16y ago
It is not a new system, it is an already existing technology called Apache HBase that is part of the Hadoop ecosystem. Here is a video from the recent Hadoop World conference, where Jonathan Gray from Facebook speaks about their experiences with HBase: http://vimeo.com/16350544 http://vimeo.com/16350544
- riffraff 16y ago
  yup I know what hbase is, we used it at my previous job (but I recall stuff like "reimplementation of hbase in bash"[1] being insightful, it was not a great experience though I'm sure it matured a lot by now) Thanks a lot for the conference video, but even this mostly describes their "well known" scribe/log analysis infrastructure, and does not get into how the new stuff gets integrated with hbase. [1] http://pastebin.com/f64fc84a9 http://pastebin.com/f64fc84a9

AndrewO 16y ago

People are aware of Facebook’s Cassandra system, but now they’ve built something new called hBase... As in Apache HBase? Not to be too pedantic, but that's not really something that Facebook "built". I'm assuming that was an error on TC's part.

megrimlock 16y ago
Media is most appealing when it seduces the reader into a sense of insight. Obvious errors in reporting on familiar areas pierces this illusion, and makes one wonder how accurate coverage is of other areas.

deleted 16y ago

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mikedanko 16y ago

Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of took the user stories and simplified them but... I don't see how this is different than anything Yahoo did 4-5 years ago. From the standpoint of using their IM app, things are forwarded to email or SMS depending on what the user wants. If you're in the webmail app similar options are provided. They also had a sort of seamless SMS from their webmail client a long time ago. I'm not sure what I'd call it, Intermodal Communication? How is what Facebook is doing here any different than the Yahoo model?

mikedanko 16y ago

This sounds super for Facebook users, but does this entice any Non-Facebook users? Are they doing anything to capture the people who don't see value in it?

gcb 16y ago

Give facebook even more credentials. also, this is very similar to yahoo mail year-old inbox (you can read social feeds from pretty much anywhere... flickr, twitter, etc, etc)

kuahyeow 16y ago

This is interesting. On one hand Facebook doesn't try to attempt to satisfy the email crowd (imagine Blackberry and corporate firewalls), on the other hand, they are looking squarely at the SMS crowd (imagine teens who send 500+ sms a month, and complain $10 a month for the privilege is too much). The scale is much larger and the requirements less stringent, yet the market is ripe to be pried apart, as most sms providers and telcos are basically milking it.