Thanks to Facebook’s continuous need to innovate you will soon be able to have a chat conversation with your friends and not have to say “BRB” or “TTYL” when you need to go.
Last week Mark Zuckerberg took the stage and announced a new Facebook messaging platform that merges email, chat, and text messaging. Overall I like the idea. The basics behind the idea is that you will have one on-going conversation with each of your friends where the messages get sent to you in the most instant way based on if you are online or not. Obviously for the text messaging feature to work Facebook will need to know your cell phone number.
It makes sense to merge chat and email in the way Facebook is going about it. I am honestly tired of dealing with having to remember when I emailed a particular friend about a particular topic and what the subject was or if I even included a subject. Realistically this is not a huge issue because the message can be found fast enough by doing a search of my gmail account for emails that mention that friends name, this would return emails sent to me by them, emails sent to them by me, and emails that simply mention their name in the body or subject. What Facebook did with their new system is eliminate the subject line and merge all contact with Jon Doe into one thread. The more I think about it that is the best way to organize your messages with a person or group of people (for group messages). I can not wait to get access to the new system and try it out and I really think it is going to change the face of email for me and my gmail account is going to become my account that I use for business while Facebook will be what I use for all personal communication.
I am also excited by the way Facebook is going to determine if you want to see a message or not and the fact that you are able to allow everyone to email you, just friends, friends-of-friends, and so on. This means that I will be able to give out my @facebook.com address after getting access to the new system and it will actually allow me to communicate with people who do not have Facebook through Facebook. The other thing that is going to be added, at a time yet to be announced by Facebook, that excites me is IMAP support meaning I can configure my iPhone (or Android phone, when I switch) to notify me of new messages without having to launch the Facebook website or Application.
I honestly hope this changes the way other email providers like Yahoo, GMail, and Hotmail think about email. I dont need subject lines anymore and I want all my contact with Jon Doe to show up in a single thread not 100s of threads dating back to the beginning of my relationship with him.