As much hyped, Facebook announced and showed how they believe next generation would want their social communication. So here’s our take on what it is and if we’d really use it.
The features were inline with what we’ve predicted before the event.
Here are some of the cool things it brings to Facebook ‘revamped’ messaging’
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A new email address. You’ll get a @FaceBook.com email address. And you can’t customize your handle, it’ll be your facebook username by default. Thanks facebook – I’ll now get a ton of spam (in case you don’t manage it well) as Facebook profile handle is public.
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Unified Inbox – I know for a while, Google’s been saying the same and has quite achieved it partially (atleast the way we love it). We’ve even posted a wish list for Google’s new social network. So here Facebook shows an unified inbox with chat/messages and Facebook mails all unified together to be a single timeline.
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A person-centric conversation history – This means if you open up your Girlfriend’s profile – you can see all the love and hate messages you sent to her together (Why did you store them in the first place!!). Keep them private 🙂
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Priority Inbox – With facebook not allowing customization of email handles. There comes a problem of SPAM. So this solves the same purpose as of Google’s priority inbox – You don’t want spam or never-emailed-me-before kind of a friend’s message to be the first unread. For most of us who check our mail frequently – It’s just the SPAM we’re worried about.
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Others – An awesome simple UI to do this. Although Joel Seligstein, The Engineering Manager for the Facebook’s new messages product claims that it’ll take a while for every one to get used to its awesome’ness (Do u think we’re dumb dude?).
But we do agree with him that it’ll be the college folks that’ll adopt it first who wish to have immediate communication or a painless way to communicate. But we don’t think email is going away till this ‘next-gen email-ution’ continues. We of course loved Google Wave and still believe it’s how the over-lords would communicate.
Yes, thinking about an email subject really works up my brain </sarcasm>. You should be using Yahoo’s subject generator here.
Some screenshots (why were they blurred, can’t you create dummy users in your sandbox environment or something?)
Want an invitation? So do we. But go ahead and signup for an early invite. Facebook’s going to ensure that they follow the ‘GMail and Google Wave’ release pattern by limiting the number of users who’re gonna get the invites (limited/exclusivity/closed). We’ll surely try to procure one for us and try to share it with woikr readers.
Got more questions about this ‘next gen’ messaging system. Head over to FB Messaging FAQ.
[Screenshots – Mashable]
