After reading Facebook’s blog on Messages, I thought I should write down some thoughts:
“Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”
Initially I thought of write(1). This feels like unix communiation (ytalk, irc, etc) done the Web 2.0 way. Or as some pointed out on twitter, like Wave without collaboration tools.
As for the Social Inbox, this is an implementation of a concept similar to Gmail’s Priority Inbox. Messages from people I know go into the Inbox, the rest go to the Other Inbox. Pretty simple classification mechanism (and quite effective).
“We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not.”
Messages is not email, but it builds a walled garden. And like I once read (and frequently repeat) in the Internet walled gardens are doomed to communicate via SMTP.
Managing organized complexity 
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