Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.
Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive.
And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify your contacts list if you're online.
These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication / contacts.
But I don't expect Facebook to get this, especially considering their total disregard of the way people interact with one another. It's a wonder they are number #1, but I guess the alternatives sucked a lot more.
Wait a minute, is that true? Do you pay for receiving text messages in the US? That does seem a little crazy from a European perspective.
Clearly no-one in the US gets any text message spam, or they'd be _really_ angry about paying to receive that.
When I signed an agreement in college, I texted so infrequently that I saved money by paying for individual messages. Now that I can afford it, I still pay per message as an excuse - I can ask people to call or email without sounding rude.
Also, it's funny that Apple is being brought up in this context. The iPhone treats SMS messages just like chat messages (using the iChat UI), which is exactly the "problem" being described in the article of mixing messaging types carelessly.
[Edited to clarify which part of the parent I was responding to]
Before that, I used to use Foxmail, then Thunderbird and then Evolution and none of them have been as good as Apple Mail
Both companies to a large degree embody their founders and because of that take wildly different courses of action.
Jobs at Facebook would be a disaster because the company has not been setup in a Jobs-friendly manner.
Both companies are also wildly successful because they avoid design by committee. Facebook is about sharing your information with everyone, it's not the place for privacy nuts. Apple is about delivering the best computing experience possible, it's not the place for tinkerers.
Jobs heading Facebook would be a platypus, it just doesn't make sense. Jobs has been on a roll for a while, maybe Messaging is Zuckerberg's Newton. Maybe it isn't. Calling it on the first day is something I would not do.
My first reaction when I read about this new Facebook component was that it would be hard to use without being annoying. The medium of communication matters. For example, you might be forgiven for using txt-speak in an SMS, but when I get an email written like that, it gives me a negative impression of the sender.
I'm also trying to get my head around what problem this is actually trying to solve. It is much the sort of "meta problem" that programmers like to solve. The devil is in the details though, and usually those fall through the cracks. Witness all the mostly awful attempts at "write once run anywhere" desktop GUI implementations.
Just looking at this long term, one can see that facebook will likely try to push their interface as a standard communications interface to everyone that you want to reach (business or otherwise) and ultimately let users choose how they can be contacted. This has far reaching implications for a product trying to reach their customers. Maybe they will even break this out into a paid product for businesses to reach their customers, who knows. Theres alot that can be done with a system like this. And im surprised it took so long for someone to do it. I believe the market has been begging for something like this for a while.
Full stop. While the messaging landscape is definitely changing, the notion that the subject field is now obsolete seems extremely premature, to say the least.
On the one hand, the idea of mixing all these messaging formats together sounds like it might be a confusing mess -- a Google Wave-level UI disaster. As he points out, these media have very different usage patterns that may not turn out to mesh that well.
On the other hand, saying "Facebook should just do a beautiful, elegant implementation of what everybody else has already done" is a very low-risk strategy. It doesn't innovate or solve any new problems. As a strategy for an industry-defining company, this is a route to irrelevance.
So is it better for Facebook to risk failure, or risk being boring? I have to say they've recovered well from failure in the past (Beacon, early mis-steps with news feeds), so my vote would be for the gutsy, risky, change-the-game strategy.
The problem here is that they're creating a wildly complex solution to a non-problem. It's not a question about being boring -- it's already boring because only software engineers care about unifying people's inboxes.
After the 9/11 attacks, Apple was still working hard on development while others cut back. Many thought Apple was crazy to build fancy retail stores at very costly locations. Many said that targeting the high-end of the market was doomed to fail in a weak economy, but Apple kept expanding.
Maybe the choices Apple has made just don't seem so risky after seeing them being so wildly successful? The Gateway stores are long gone. I haven't seen details of the revenue per square foot at Microsoft stores.
And although it may not seem so today - launching a glass-fronted phone with a single button, was seen by many to be completely nuts.
Besides, MySpace also had a huge network effect, and lost to Facebook.
I disagree that. Google have made some usable softwares. Before Gmail came, webmail was a mess. I guess people remember those popups and irritating ads from Yahoomail, hotmail etc.
Both articles essentially state that the company (Apple/Facebook) should not try to innovate, because their implementation will suck and then go on to mention problems that are rather trivial and will not actually be problems.
Sorry, but I think Facebook is good enough at product design that they can pull this off. Facebook doesn't need Steve Jobs; Zuckerberg is pretty bad ass at making products people like and use extensively. If you need evidence you should look at Facebook, a lot of people REALLY like that service.
That said, first and foremost, Facebook is a contact management app. Allowing people externally to send messages to a FB account is the next step in managing contacts. The UI enhancements are unimportant in comparison.
Uhh, if you base your SMS arguments from the U.S. outlook alone, you have clearly missed the point. The rest of the world has adapted to SMS much better than the U.S (well, the stupid charges here are to blame) and facebook clearly has a global outlook.
Abstracting the communication medium is actually solving a pain - because you, the receiver, have decided where you will be available. So, if you decide not to get a text, you can do that.
Having said all that, I find the whole thing creepy for now facebook will know not only who you are friends with, who your family is, and who your ex is, but also where you were last night; but, the zinger is facebook can now gauge your social signals in real time. That's a scary thought!
This is very true, I don't know if it is common knowledge inside the US but the rest of the world doesn't generally pay to recieve messages.
You can get unlimited internet on your phone for an extra fiver, or tenner a month.
It's foolproof!
The author basically thinks he is smarter than the guys who founded facebook, and that they should do something he believes Steve Jobs would have done had he been with facebook?
Supermarkets carrying things other than groceries (e.g. lightbulbs) didn't necessarily solve a user problem (i.e. people just went to the hardware store for light bulbs), but that decision was still a win for supermarkets.
