Why Facebook’s New Messaging Is Bad For the Internet

Like many nerds, I watched the live feed of Facebook’s announcement regarding its new messaging platform. I had high hopes for it but, alas, not only is their product fairly basic, turns out it’ll actually be bad for the Internet. Here’s why.

Facebook Can Shut Your Email Off. Forever.

Let’s say you decide to use Facebook as your primary email service. Your email address of davesmith@facebook.com is entirely within the control of Facebook. They could, for any reason they like, disable or delete your account, preventing you from accessing your email. Facebook has been notorious for disabling accounts without reason or explanation. To this day, my account is banned from advertising on their service for a reason they won’t tell me. Since there was no mention of the POP mail protocol at the announcement, it’s an easy assumption that Facebook won’t support the downloading of your mail to your own hard disk.¹

Other providers are much less punitive. Plus, you can get your own domain (like my todmaffin.com domain) and use it as a pointer to your real email address. My actual email provider is Gmail, but I use a @todmaffin.com email address to forward emails there. But here’s the trick: Gmail will send my emails as if they’re coming from the @todmaffin.com address, meaning in theory my actual Gmail address isn’t locked in people’s address books.

Facebook’s new messaging system will almost certainly only send emails as the @facebook.com address, meaning if Facebook decides they don’t like your username (or any of the other hundreds of seemingly arbitrary account-deletion decisions they’ve made), your email just dies.

UPDATE: By total coincidence, today Facebook seems to be randomly disabling the accounts of women, claiming their profile isn’t authentic.

You Thought One Spam Folder Was Bad…

Facebook’s new email system actually introduces a second spam folder, called Other Messages. Basically, emails from your Facebook friends and people you manually designate will go into your inbox and everyone else will drop into an Other Messages folder where they’ll live in obscurity.

One More Island of Data To Search

We already have more islands of data to search through to find what we’re looking for. Our personal email, our work email, our phone’s text message history. This would introduce yet another island to search through.

In an attempt to keep my email all consolidated in one place, I’ve taken to responding to any Facebook email I get with a macro that says:

Thanks for emailing me on Facebook. This is an automated message. I have NOT seen your message.

I am trying to consolidate my email, so please send your email to:

EMAILADDRESS@todmaffin.com

I will not see your email if you don’t send it to the above address. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks.

Is it really automated? No. I paste that in manually. And of course I could very well read and reply right in Facebook, but I don’t want to have yet another place to search. (As it stands right now, the ability to search your Facebook messages is sorely lacking.)

Of course, you can’t simply turn off Facebook email. What I’d love is a way to set up a never-expiring vacation message that replies with the above, but it’s not there now, and it won’t be there in the next version.

Facebook Could Have Reinvented Email As We Know It

The system that drives the a lot of the Internet’s email is actually a relatively small Unix program called sendmail. Except for some security patches and minor updates here and there, it really hasn’t undergone an overhaul since its development. Compare that to the countless other web apps which keep adding features and functionality. (There’s a reason for that. sendmail exists in hundreds of thousands of places. Giving it a large-scale update would require all the other installations to upgrade as well, a task that would be a logistical nightmare.)

This is why Facebook, with its closed email system, could have reinvented email and really made it something useful. For instance, we could have the ability to “recall” emails if they haven’t yet been read (as some corporate email systems like Exchange and Groupwise can do), emails could have an expiration date/time where they just deleted themselves from inboxes if they expire, or any of the functions I wrote about in my article Email 2.0.

But, no. It seems Facebook’s email system is, essentially, Hotmail with a pre-populated whitelist. That’s it.

Get Ready to Be Drowned in IMs and Text Messages

Facebook’s engineering lead was positively giddy when he described how Facebook’s new email system will offer a “seamless” messaging experience. If you’re at your computer and logged in, replies show up as IM chat windows. If you step away, replies get delivered to your cell phone as a text message.

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

I rather like leaving my emails in an inbox for me to come back to. If I need to get someone’s email forwarded to my cell phone, I’ll set up a filter thankyouverymuch — big surprise: no mention of any filtering ability in Facebook’s system. Don’t hold your breath.

Can you imagine sending or replying to a half-dozen emails over the course of a morning, then watching your Facebook tab flash, your cell phone start chiming, your email box filling up. You’ll yearn for the days of Hotmail 1.0.

What do you think? Will you use Facebook’s messaging system?