Facebook messaging is a snooze

Facebook just announced their new messaging system.

Count me out.

I’m not particularly interested in giving Facebook yet another way to slurp up more of my data into their systems where I can’t easily get it it back.

I’ve always hated Facebook messages. Mostly because I have to access them through Facebook’s site (or app) and they’re really hard to share with anyone who isn’t on Facebook. The original implementation got a bunch of other stuff wrong too, most notably the fact that in an N-way conversation for N > 2, the default action is reply-all. (Why on god's green earth?!)

This doesn’t strike me as a really great way to think about communication. No subject lines? No threading? Okay, they’d better have some kick-ass search, and I doubt that they’re going to. They claim to be “working on” IMAP support. Why isn’t it here now? The answer to that is that Facebook doesn’t want you to use IMAP because then you won’t go through their site to get to your messages.

Sure, I’ll probably get my @facebook.com address just in case someone really can’t figure out any other way to contact me (there’s a reason I list my email address and IM screen names on my Facebook profile), but I’m not about to start using it instead of real email and IM. Maybe if it were anyone other than Facebook.

… hey, maybe that should be my new slogan. “Anywhere but Facebook”. What do you think?

Comments

[Yann]

About getting your data back: you can get a zip file with all your data in it:

https://register.facebook.com/download

The link is in your Account settings.

[atoulouse]

Don't ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Or rather, they're competent enough, but not competent enough for 15 people to scale IMAPS access up to 500 million people.

I'm not ready to let Facebook subsume my other means of contact, and perhaps never will be, but with 500 million users, they have to build to scale not only their ability to serve users, but to detect and ward off fraud. I wouldn't knock them too hard for not having IMAP yet.

But yeah, I think that in some respects the product takes one step forward and at least two steps backwards. It seems like more of a bridge between how tweens communicate and how our generation and older communicate. Not sure how much I'll really use it if at all.