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Communications Facebook Social Networks

New Facebook Messaging System Announced 240

Mark Zuckerberg just held a presentation to unveil Facebook's "next generation messaging" system. He repeatedly drove home the idea that "this is not email," nor is it "an email killer." Their plan is to tie together multiple forms of communication — email, texts, social updates, etc. — and blend them into conversations. As users go about their days, interacting with a variety of devices, the communication method automatically updates to whatever is appropriate at the time. If a user receives an email while he's at a desktop, browsing Facebook, it will bring up the message in a Facebook chat window. If the user is browsing on a smartphone, it will bring up the message there, instead. If it's a dumbphone, then a text message can be sent. Another central feature is the idea that conversation histories from multiple sources and different forms of communication can be integrated through Facebook, so that you no longer have to separately root through IM logs, SMS logs, old emails, etc., to see old correspondence. (Users will have the ability to delete these, should they desire.) The last major feature they mentioned is what they call the "social" inbox, which is based on whitelisting. Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently. The new system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months.
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New Facebook Messaging System Announced

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  • So, it's gmail/gchat? Whoopdedoo.
    • by oldspewey ( 1303305 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:25PM (#34234336)

      Don't diss the potential of this.

      This will allow people to receive a constant stream of idiotic Farmville/Mafiawars/Cafeworld updates all day long wherever they happen to be. Think of the potential this has to increase productivity in the field of lost productivity.

      • Re:Gmail/Gchat? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Threni ( 635302 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:32PM (#34234426)

        Also, unless you change the default settings, opt out, and keep up wit the changes, other people will be allowed to read your email, and send email on you behalf.

        • by SETIGuy ( 33768 )
          And with less spam control. I've been getting Nigeria spam in friend requests lately.
        • by Beardo the Bearded ( 321478 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @04:11PM (#34235650)

          Eh, I usually send out only three types of email anyway:

          1. No, that design will fail.
          2. The estimate doesn't have enough hours.
          3. I told you three months ago that the design would fail and the plan didn't have enough hours.

          So go ahead.

          • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.

          • by formfeed ( 703859 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @07:16PM (#34237378)

            You obviously don't see the benefits of this.
            Since it is quite popular right now to play out technology in I/m-a-Mac/PC-style skits, I wrote one for you:

            Messy, the message integration -a cool looking Hipster stands in front of a presentation console:
            "Hi, I'm facebook's message integration. Cool, everything integrated and in one place.
            Right now, User is giving a presentation of the monthly project update to Grumpy-boss and I help him find information faster.
            Wait? Boss wants project stats? This is so cool, I can find that for you."

            A farmer in dirty coveralls walks in: "Hi neighbor, it' s Jim from Farmville. Just wanna let you know, that your tomatoes are about to wilt."

            Messy: Ooopsy. Let's filter for "boss"

            A slightly drunk frat boy walks in: "You are so right! That guy's a total loser. But my boss is even worse than.. "

            Messy cuts him off, hits a couple buttons.

            A woman in lingerie and high black boots walks in: "Hi. I am the pictures you downloaded last night."

            Messy begins to sweat and starts hitting the console

            An older woman in a raindeer sweater walks in: "I'm an email from your mom. Who is that nice woman you just put on your facebook page?"

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      "Will you walk in to my Parlour, Said the Spider to the Fly..."

      Tis the prettiest little parlor
      That ever you did spy.
      The way into my parlor
      Is up a winding stair,
      And I have many pretty things
      To show when you are there."
      "Oh, no, no!" said the little fly,
      "To ask me is in vain;
      For who goes up your winding stair
      Can ne'er come down again."

      "I'm sure you must be weary
      With soaring up so high;
      Will you rest upon my little bed?"
      Said the spider to the fly.
      "There are pretty curtains drawn around,
      The sheets are fine and th

  • by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:05PM (#34234004)
    Facebook wants all your messages so they can mine them for any possible personal information and sell it to the highest bidders. Is anyone surprised?
    • by spazdor ( 902907 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:06PM (#34234024)

      Not to worry. If it proves to be a useful and popular feature, Diaspora will undoubtedly implement it too, eventually.

    • by interkin3tic ( 1469267 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:19PM (#34234250)

      Is anyone surprised?

      I am a little surprised that there's not already a story about how this will lead to massive privacy breaches. Whether that's because facebook is getting better about privacy, getting better about avoiding bad press about privacy breaches, or whether that's because everyone who would have written an article about the privacy breaches gave up assuming anything facebook does will have the same effect, I don't know.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Yeah, and Google doesn't want this?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Facebook wants all your messages so they can mine them for any possible personal information and sell it to the highest bidders. Is anyone surprised?

      And when that doesn't work, they'll adjust their privacy settings and boom, your "private" conversations will be public for all - just google search what your boss really thinks of you!

      In the meantime, just have one of your mutual friends forward stuff to you. (There is no privacy on facebook if unless it's all marked "Only Me". Because otherwise it's like emai

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      Facebook wants all your messages so they can mine them for any possible personal information and sell it to the highest bidders. Is anyone surprised?

      I've read (in print) and heard (from unreliable sources) that Facebook's data mining has been instrumental in custom politicking, or "political engineering" (no, I did not hear this from right-wing types), in particular the site's relationship with the Obama administration involves even personally identifying information being shared through direct channels - rather than through typical avenues afforded the average end-user, such as Obama teams simply monitoring the site like anyone else. Could anyone veri

    • It's actually worse than that. If Facebook is going to wind up having direct access to your e-mail, then they are also able to mine information from your contacts (who may not wish to have anything to do with Facebook, have not given their consent, and have no way of detecting in advance that this will happen) from your end.

      This, of course, is pretty standard Facebook MO; see the whole fiasco about importing contact details etc. lately. However, it's even more creepy than usual, because it's entering a spac

  • by moronikos ( 595352 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:05PM (#34234008) Journal

    Maybe somebody will figure out how to use it this time around.

    • by spazdor ( 902907 )

      Is that what Google Wave was for?

      Who knew!

    • by DragonWriter ( 970822 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:40PM (#34234540)

      So it's Google Wave re-born?

      Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.

      Its more like googles integrated messaging suite -- with the Gmail integrated interface with chat, email, status updates (Buzz), voice messaging/calling, etc., options for many of those to be delivered to phones via SMS, etc.

      • Wave was more than collaborative editing. It blurred the line between email and IM.

        You had the immediacy of IM, could have multiple people "chatting" at once, and integrated the more powerful features of email (such as attachments, video, pictures, etc). It also was saved for posterity, where as IM threads are somewhat disposable.

        Wave provided all these features, and more. Perhaps it was a bit too revolutionary because most people took a quick look at it and had no idea what it was, or how to use it. And if

        • Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.

          Wave was more than collaborative editing.

          Yes, the statement "X was largely Y" means something very different from "X was exclusively Y".

          That being said, what Facebook seems to be rolling out seems to be a lot what Google has done in unification of its various messaging systems through, e.g., the Gmail interface than what Google did and abandoned with Wave.

          • Instead of abandoning Wave, Google should have presented it to all Gmail users to try out. If they rolled it out to every Gmail user as an optional new way to talk to people, then they'd have a large group of users.

            Part of me hopes that all this Facebook buzz will make Google consider their decision to abandon Wave.

            • Part of me hopes that all this Facebook buzz will make Google consider their decision to abandon Wave.

              Why would Facebook copying what Google is doing with things that are not Wave encourage Google to reconsider their decision to discontinue Wave as a product?

              • Because there is a problem here that Facebook is trying to address. Instead of handing the keys over to Facebook, Google should try to offer up their own solution to the problem.

                You don't want to have to check 10 services to see if there are new messages. You want easy, quick and accessible communications.

                Wave could be that future. Voice can direct calls to you. It can handle video chat. It can handle a "chat" with multiple people. It can handle IM and quick messages. It can handle email. It can handle atta

      • by macshit ( 157376 ) <[snogglethorpe] [at] [gmail.com]> on Monday November 15, 2010 @04:38PM (#34235978) Homepage

        So it's Google Wave re-born?

        Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.

        Note that newest version of Google Docs does suddenly have really, really, excellent collaborative editing, and I've heard people say that the tech came from Wave...

    • Maybe somebody will figure out how to use it this time around.

      Actually, this might be the right place for it.

      We had a big* earthquake here in NH a few months ago about 11:30. A big data-gathering/experience sharing thing broke out on a few friends' comments. Many of our friend circles' overlapped, but there were people on each node that weren't seeing data on the other nodes. We'd worked out a non-explosion event, about where it was centered, about a half hour before the USGS data went up on their site.

  • by NickFortune ( 613926 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:06PM (#34234032) Homepage Journal

    That sounds very similar to the idea behind Wave.

    Which is interesting, since it's not so long ago that the Wave creator quit Google for Facebook [slashdot.org].

    Let's see if the idea fares any better on facebook than it did on Google.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      It also sounds like what AOL is doing with Project Phoenix [cnet.com]

      There's a "quick bar" at the top for sending short e-mails, instant messages (which pop up in very Google Chat-like windows), and text messages.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AutumnLeaf ( 50333 )

      The similarities to Wave were the first thing that came to my mind. As an aside, I think Google should have blended wave into gmail, not had them side-by-side. None-the-less, I have to think some of this had to been cooking long before the google guy jumped ship - there just hasn't been enough time to design/build/test a change this big to their service, imho... unless I'm underestimating how robust their agile development processes are. . .

    • One of the great things about Wave was that it was an open protocol - you could set up your own server which could communicate with all other Wave servers. I really don't think Facebook is going to implement that part...

      • I really don't think Facebook is going to implement that part...

        And neither did Google for that matter. I set up my own server (their reference implementation) and Wave didn't allow federation with other servers, and still won't before their servers go dark.

    • Wave was about getting work done more effectively (boring).

      This is about broadcasting narcissistic media snippets more effectively (exciting)!

  • Hurray! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:07PM (#34234034)
    Another way to talk to people I never see in person!
  • by SeriouslyNoClue ( 1842116 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:07PM (#34234036)
    Facebook is the only technologically literate company to get Social Networking correct. Where all others have failed, Facebook has broken through the weeds into the clearing and are far ahead of everyone else. Even the mighty Google failed with Buzz and now Facebook is doing something new and original by introducing a messaging system that is not designed to replace e-mail. Hopefully, if they get this correct, they will be able to log and store all your messages so that you never lose them even after you get drunk or high and try to delete them!

    Zuckerberg has really turned it around with this move and let me be the first to welcome Zuckerberg to my browser where my industrious and productive Farmville makes every visitor happy. The future is here. The future is now. The future is Facebook.
  • when it was called google wave. I suspect it will have similar measure of success, though that will be hard to measure as it's integrated into facebook.
    • by Americano ( 920576 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:20PM (#34234258)

      Actually, I suspect that the fact that it's integrated right into Facebook will make it far more successful than Wave was. It may still not be a resounding success / 'gmail killer', but I've already seen a lot of my less-technical friends move to Facebook messaging for most of their communications with friends - event invites, messages, chat, wall updates, etc., all going through Facebook. If Facebook continues to grow, it could very well become the "platform of choice" for messaging for a large number of people. Wave honestly wasn't pushed that hard, and it wasn't really marketed as "something to do awesome messaging!" It was, "This thing we built that's kinda neat, see what you think."

      Facebook is also MUCH more aggressive than Google about opting-in users for new services.

      I'm not saying any of this is necessarily a *good* thing - in fact, for privacy, it will probably be a very bad thing - but I expect this service will be significantly more successful than Wave, simply because Facebook is huge, and they're not above using that size to opt-in every single one of their users for a new service. And while some of their use-cases seem to be a little creepy, they do (for better or worse), seem to think about "what are our users going to *do* with this thing?" Wave was sort of billed as "a cool collaboration thingy that you should totally check out. if you want to. Maybe? Please?" It was a cool piece of tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.

  • by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:13PM (#34234126)
    "Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently."

    In other words, you will now be able to get to see just what you want and eliminate all the noise, spam and crap you never ever wanted to see in the first place...wasn't that the reason we signed up for social networking to begin with?
    To me, facebook is admitting that their service is so flooded with crap that they now need a built-in crap filter to make it useful again.
    • by Americano ( 920576 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:33PM (#34234442)

      Actually your primary communications forums in Facebook aren't "flooded by crap," unless you accept every invite and request sent to you - and in that case, you might as well submit your email address to every web site you visit that asks you to "register", you'll get the same results. If Facebook starts allowing people to message you using "@facebook.com" email addresses, you will rapidly end up receiving spam there. I have no need for a whitelist at present, because my friends on Facebook are only (and actually) the people I care to communicate with, and I ignore any requests from people I don't know. If they were to expose an @facebook.com email address, then any J Random Spambot can message me... and that'd be a problem. Implementing a whitelist is pretty much the only way to prevent that.

      • Oh so a little notificaiton every time someone plays Farmville, Mafia Wars of some other bs app isn't crap?
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by edmicman ( 830206 )

          How have you not already blocked notifications from those apps? They solved the problem of those things flooding your newsfeed a long time ago.

        • by D Ninja ( 825055 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:54PM (#34234718)

          Do you even use Facebook? You can block all the apps, or block an specific app on a permanent basis, or block a user (so you don't get any of their spammy invites, but can still be friends with them), or do a wide variety of other things to keep the noise down. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a huge fan of Facebook either. But at least understand what its capabilities are before you go attacking what they can (or can't) do.

        • If you're still seeing notifications every time someone plays a game and you don't want to see those, then you seriously need to learn how to use Facebook - and we're talking *remedial* education here.

          You can suppress all display of notifications from any app with... 2 clicks? Perhaps a mouseover and a single-click. You can also filter your default "feed" to show only status updates, or other things you might be interested in, instead of the "live stream of every update people have made."

          If you're unhappy

      • Actually you still get flooded with crap even if you're selective -- you might have good friends who insist on posting farmville updates, and using "share this on Facebook!" a hundred times a day. The former you can already filter (one app at a time) , but not the latter. And on mobile clients - at least for BB -- you can't filter any of it.

        I do agree with your assessment of whitelist for @facebook.com though... it's the only way this could be managed.

        • If one of your friends turns into a spambot who only exists to "share this on facebook," then unfriend them, or suppress display of all messages from that person in your news feed. It's quite filterable, try it some time.

          I still maintain that if you *actually* have friends who are posting dozens of updates a day that amount to nothing but spam, you're doing something wrong. If the concern is that you "could" have that, well, it's ultimately a problem of your own creation: learn to filter those people or

        • by dave562 ( 969951 )

          And on mobile clients - at least for BB -- you can't filter any of it.

          This is misleading. If you apply a filter using a desktop client, the mobile client will respect that filter. So you are only partially true in that you cannot filter from your mobile client. You cannot setup filters on the mobile client.

        • by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

          If someone floods me with crap, I have three choices:

          1: Hide their status updates. They won't know, and likely don't care that their prattle isn't making my morning reading.

          2: Add them in a group that denies them access to most of your profile. I do this with the people that are questionable (lots of friends in common, but don't know personally, and don't want to be impolite.) This way, if they are spambots, they won't have access to much, and if they are bona fide people worth knowing, I don't have to

    • by makomk ( 752139 )

      In other words, you will now be able to get to see just what you want and eliminate all the noise, spam and crap you never ever wanted to see in the first place

      ...but only if the spam comes in via e-mail, i.e. from companies that don't participate in the Facebook ecosystem and help make Facebook more money. Nice money-maker.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by w0mprat ( 1317953 )
      Nobody here is going to mention Gmails new priority inbox feature? Essientially the same.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Facebook simply wants to coerce its users to put in real contact data, that is a lot more valuable to sell later:

    - email accounts
    - real mobile phone numbers
    - IM accounts

  • by lwsimon ( 724555 ) <lyndsy@lyndsysimon.com> on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:15PM (#34234162) Homepage Journal

    I have misgivings about giving Google access to this much data, and at least they promise to act responsibly.

  • So it begins (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bonch ( 38532 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:17PM (#34234196)

    It was inevitable that Facebook would decide to become its own little internet. Good luck with that, Facebook.

  • RFC? Standard? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alexandre ( 53 ) * on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:20PM (#34234256) Journal

    Have they tried pushing this as a standard, distributed, normal internet protocol or is this just one more extension to facebook's "eco-system" that screws up internet principles?

    • by nmoog ( 701216 )
      To be fair though I don't think Facebook is bound legally to internet principles. Besides, Google opened up the federation protocol of Wave and a bunch of other technologies, and look where that got 'em!
      • by alexandre ( 53 ) *

        Nobody is bound to internet principles no more than people are bound to freedom...
        The question is that they openly reject them now and should be boycotted for what they stand for, ie: becoming the new social failure that AOL and Compuserve were.

    • Is it the action that screws up Internet principles, or is it that fact that so few people are aware; and if made aware could be bothered to care? They couldn't do this successfully without a *large* helping of complacence from the rest of the Internet.
  • by digitalsushi ( 137809 ) <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Monday November 15, 2010 @02:24PM (#34234308) Journal

    In the beginning, the geeks floated in the muck with the commoners. And they were annoyed and so they built a boat on which to hide from that underneath.

    And then the commoners heard of the boat and they too, came aboard.

    And so then, the geeks, annoyed, hopped back into the mucky waters below, only to find it empty and serene.

    And so is my view of the Internet, as I watch the shadows of the SS Facebook floating above me. I can hear it's muted basslines if I stop long enough to listen.

  • mean that you actually have to check the spam to be sure that won't be receiving mail from people you didnt approved yet, thats so 2003's. I prefer Gmail approach.
  • Still skeptical on this one, nothing new and just a shiny interface for basically already existing services. And the facebook.com email address I feel will be a bad idea as it will confuse brand from its employees.
  • by lusiads ( 887888 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @03:00PM (#34234800)
    Does it have a 'real' delete button?
  • by Ezekiel68 ( 652736 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @03:02PM (#34234812)
    Zuckerberg made it clear that this service is the result of product research. He said that young people consistently told him email was "too slow." When he dug into their answer they didn't mean slow as in "it takes too long to get to you", they meant they didn't want to have to log into yet another application to read their emails. Among that demographic, a sizable number don't even use a separate email account. They just use SMS on phones and Facebook (either chat or messaging) to communicate. So the main benefits he and "Bozz", his Director of Engineering touted was the reduced friction involved in being able to quickly message through the app you're probably already logged into with the knowledge that your message will get through to the recipient whether or not they use Facebook.
  • Lauren Weinstein raises a few alarm bells:

    Based on preliminary information I heard from the Facebook launch announcement today [...] users will not have the ability to declare chats or related conversations to be "off the record" -- everything will apparently be recorded. Individual users will have the ability to archive or delete their own copies of transcripts, but it appears that there is explicitly not a functionality similar to Google's "off the record" chat feature, which permits users to declare t

  • So is Facebook now officially the same thing as AOL from 15 years ago, minus keywords?

    W

  • by gsgriffin ( 1195771 ) on Monday November 15, 2010 @03:03PM (#34234828)
    Sorry guys, but I trust the brain power at Google to keep my emails safer than Facebook. Not to dis Facebook engineers, but they are nowhere near the capacity of Google. If I'm going to send information that I don't want leaked or have conversations that need to be private, I'm not looking to Facebook anytime soon as the conduit.
  • I'm an avid web developer and an early adopter techie. I couldn't pay attention past the first sentence of the slashdot summary, let alone be bothered to figure out what way facebook has figured out how to rob my grandma of her privacy next.

    Honestly, it just sounds like whoop-dee-fucking-doo bells and whistles on top of status updates.

    Here's some advice Zuckerberg. When you can summarize it in a sentence, people will pay attention.

    Then again, what do I know. I never would have guessed you could build a h

    • In a sentence: receive your messages according to where you are, not according to how the message was sent (e-mail vs IM, etc)

      I've never used facebook, nor ever plan to, but it does sound a useful feature.

      • My phone already provides me with immediate notifications from Facebook, email, IM, text message, etc. No matter how someone tried to contact me, my phone becomes the unified gateway.

        Everyone assumed that Facebook would make their own phone, but then the carrier is still the gateway in many ways. Facebook wants to be the communication gateway that everything goes through, and in turn, Facebook then owns all of your private information.

        Mind you, Google wants all my data as well, but Google isn't sharing my d

    • by macshit ( 157376 )

      Here's some advice Zuckerberg. When you can summarize it in a sentence, people will pay attention.

      The thing is, though, that zuckerberg doesn't need people to pay attention -- all he needs is to flip a switch and whatever creaky jibber-jabber he's pimping will be in all his users' faces 24/7 popping up little "hey! wanna try something cool?! lol!" boxes...

  • It is called Gmail. And it allows for voice calls and video chat. And it has Buzz integration.

    But when Facebook invents it years later, it will be revolutionary and a Gmail killer.

    And in truth, Gmail did one-up themselves with Wave, but most people have no idea what it is, so it didn't catch on. The only reason I didn't use Wave is that the people I wanted to talk to didn't have Wave accounts. But Wave really is a brilliant integration of email, IM and more into one.

    Sadly, Facebook's solution will be closed

    • Nah... It's really to messages what Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) is for voice. It lets people contact YOU rather than contacting some device/account.

      With Google Voice people call your number and you choose on-the-fly where it's going to ring (at work, on your cell phone, at the hotel or friends house your currently at, etc). With Facebook it seems your various messaging accounts now become ways of reaching you as a person, or put another way your messages find you rather than you having to find the

      • Except in the era of smartphones and unified address books, if someone tries to send me a message via txt, email, Facebook, IM, whatever, I get the message on my phone.

        Facebook wants to the gateway to control all that. I already have a working solution without handing over all my private data to them.

        And I already have the capability of sharing my phone number, email address, etc. to friends and family on Facebook.

        If people need a unified address to find me, it is my email address. Now, I've long suggested

  • It's not Google Wave, it's Wuphf [wuphf.com]!!! (which coincidentally is what this week's Office episode is about) I hope I can link it to my fax machine.

  • Forget about "teh Facebook is da devilz yo!" rhetoric for a moment and think about the feature itself. You send a message to a person and he receives it in the most convenient way possible for the moment (sms, chat window, email), that's pretty neat.

    • I'm with you in the sense I think it's a good idea. Pidgin has done this for a while now by combining the history of multiple IM accounts together under a single person and I have found it invaluable. Now facebook is adding in the next piece. Obviously the privacy issues will loom large and become more prominent then ever, however it is a masterstroke. I can see all the big players doing that in six months.

      Now if we could get the same functionality through a combination of Thunderbird & Pidgin or Kmail

  • Well, if you could believe that he actually thinks that way and was not just deliberately stirring the pot in order to hawk his book, Tim Wu, who was mentioned in this slashdot story [slashdot.org] just two stories below this one, should technically feel very stupid right now for saying the Apple is the greatest danger to information freedom right before Facebook announces this.

    At least the guy has impeccable timing in regards to putting his foot in his mouth ;)
  • ... looking for an nonexistent problem. Time will tell.

    I personally look forward to the day while instead of keeping coming up with useless things like this someone comes up with a robust, open, secure standard for email that everybody uses. That, and a decent email client that can handle several thousand messages without choking itself to death..

  • I initially thought this would be a good thing for Facebook relinquishers like me. I still have some friends who use that crap, and sometimes they use it to distribute invitations to potlucks or whatever. I always tell them: Just send a fucking email, I mean, how hard is it to include people in the header? Just copy it from the last email we sent around!

    Anyway, insofar at Facebook's messaging standard is inching closer to a public, non-proprietary standard (email), we've made some progress. But then again

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