Facebook Messages

Original author: Joel Seligstein
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Imagine a family that you can see in modern American comedy: loving parents try to chat with a teenager, absorbed in text messaging, a child who is always online chatting, as well as various stupid relatives writing “funny” letters to the family.

Of course, this is an exaggerated stereotype, but this is what we see every day in the movies, on TV and in advertising, since most of us partially relate to this. Using mobile devices and the Internet, we can be connected today like never before, but there is still a feeling that technology can also act as a barrier between us. When I want to write something to someone, it should be as simple as defining who I want to write to and what I want to write. It should feel like a human conversation.

Today I am pleased to introduce a new generation of Messages. You decide how you want to talk with friends: via SMS, chat, via email or Messages. They will receive your messages through any medium or device convenient for them, and together you can conduct a conversation in real time. You do not have to remember who prefers instant messengers to email or worry about which technologies to use. Just select the desired name and type of message.

We also provide facebook email address. .com to everyone. Now people can chat with friends via email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To make it clear, Messages are not email. There is no topic in Messages, neither cc nor bcc, you can send a message simply by pressing Enter. We modeled them so that it was more like a chat, and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted it to be more like a conversation.



Messages were created to communicate with friends, so it made sense to organize them primarily around people. All your messages with someone will be in one place, regardless of whether they were written in chat, email or via SMS. You can see everything that you discussed with each other, as one conversation.

I greatly envy the next generation who will have Facebook throughout their lives. They will have a message history from the very beginning of life. From “nice to meet you” to “do you want to drink some coffee somehow?” And to “our children have football training today at 6”. This is a really cool idea.

It seems wrong that the email from your best friend is located between the account and the bank statement. Not that other messages are not important, but some of them are more meaningful. With new Messages, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will be sent to other folders, where you can read them separately.

If someone you know isn't on Facebook, that person’s email will first be sent to another folder. You can easily move it to your inbox, and all future conversations with it will be displayed there.



You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and only accept friends from incoming messages.

This type of message control is quite unprecedented, and people have long wanted to do this with email (and phone calls). Messages are changing the way you prevent unwanted contacts. Instead of worrying about distributing your email address, you can now control who really can reach you.

Relatively soon, we all will probably stop using arbitrary ten digits and a strange sequence of characters to communicate with each other. We simply select friends by name and can contact them immediately. We have not reached this point yet, but today's changes are a small first step.

We will launch Messages and email addresses gradually and make them available to everyone over the next few months. As soon as you receive an invitation, you can start using it, as well as invite friends to join you.

Joel Seligstin, a Facebook engineer, rejoices that you no longer need to remember which friends prefer text messages, which email, and which chat.


An invite request can be left here: facebook.com/about/messages/

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