- Give out email accounts for everyone at
@facebook.com - Build a simple, beautiful Apple-like email user interface
- Make it easy to email anyone, without having to figure out their email address. How? By leveraging the 500 million accounts that Facebook already has - their contact database is quickly becoming a White Pages for the world.
- Make it simple to search your entire conversation history, across Facebook posts, email, and Facebook IM/Messages.
[Your recipients] will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message.This sounds great, right? In theory?
Problem is that every smart person who's ever worked on SMS, IM, or email clients has come to this identical conclusion before. And we started thinking about this perfect world where users don't have to think about transports (SMS vs. email). And then we started building this product, and realized several things:
- SMS and email are different. SMS costs $ per message. Email does not. In the Facebook UI, if you add a SMS user to an email thread, he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill.
- SMS and email are different. If you send a message to an SMS recipient and 2 email recipients, what happens when the email recipient replies-all? The SMS receiver gets a message from some strange short code (32665 (FBOOK)), and he's confused about who sent the message & who will get the reply if he replies.
- Group IM conversations & email are different. In the Facebook UI, you can add people to the conversation & they have access to all previous chats. But that's not how IM or SMS works today - will people understand this? Or will they add people to conversations & accidentally leak secret messages to these new recipients?
- Facebook threads all conversations with a person into a single thread. Even if the threads are about different subjects (since Facebook demotes the email subject to the body). All this means is that your chat with Fred about his travel plans and which TV to buy get weirdly interleaved into a huge chat session.
- This solution doesn't actually solve any user problem. Humans were successfully texting, IMing, and emailing each other, before SmartEngineer came along & decided to slam them all together into a mixed up mess, in the name of "abstracting away the transport."
Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.He designed this feature to abstract away texts vs. email vs. chat. But 99% of real humans don't care about this, and won't experience his "relief" because this was never a problem in the first place. Teens always text each other, because they always have their cell phones & this is the way to reach them. And to reach your grandma, you use email. Simple. No mixing up grandma with your girlfriend.
Which brings me back to the title of this post: Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs. Facebook is the new Google - as in, they are building up an army of the best damn software developers on the planet. But having great engineers is not enough. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have each had a monopoly on great engineers for a period of time. But engineers want to solve hard problems - to build abstractions - to unify 3 different things that seem kinda similar. But this has nothing to do with solving real user problems, which is what Apple excels at. So these amazing engineers need a Product Person to direct them. Steve Jobs. Someone who doesn't just unify stuff because it's neat & challenging. Someone who thinks, "what problems do people have?" and then solves those problems (see: iPhone vs. every smartphone before the iPhone).
Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical powerhouse that can't build usable software, because the super-smart engineers have lost touch with real user problems. They need to start shopping for a new CEO, stat.
50 comments:
Mark Zuckerberg is just a dumb person. He must step down from the position first.
"Make it easy to email anyone, without having to figure out their email address. How? By leveraging the 500 million accounts that Facebook already has - their contact database is quickly becoming a White Pages for the world."
Insane! And double dumb! that no way people wanna share all personal information this with the world!
You mean they need Program Managers ? :)
Could be Program Managers or whatever. People that understand real users.
Very good post, many great remarks!
"Google can't build usable software"
This leads me to believe you haven't got a clue here. Google is one of the most innovative companies around who actually builds usable and most importantly useful stuff that nobody else had before.
I don't need to give examples here, I will let you investigate yourself.
Goodbye, forever.
great points. I don't know whether i'm happy they missed out on the potential of your described simplified email system , or upset. Leaves more room for us little ones. :-)
"Google can't build usable software"
Sad, but true. They buy a lot of innovative software, but cannot develop it themselves. Any ideas why? I have my own theories, but I'm not sure they're correct. Could also just be universal -- except for Apple and maybe Adobe, there just aren't many companies that have built more than one innovative and profitable product. Microsoft has two profitable products (Windows and Office), and neither is particularly innovative. Google has two profitable and innovative products (AdWords and PageRank). Facebook has one. Oracle has between one and zero. SAP has between one and zero. Borland has had two innovative products (Turbo Pascal, and then Delphi), and a few profitable products (Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, and I'm not sure what else).
Facebook is the new Microsoft. They're building convoluted solutions to problems no one has.
The only result is that the day you actually want to do something (send an SMS in Facebook to a phone number perhaps, or add a printer in windows) it's quickly gets very hard since half the stuff is hidden from you.
Facebook isn't the next Google, it's the new AOL.
Very interesting, I have just written some Social Media Training news about how Facebook is changing the face of email, I thought you might find it interesting.
"The SMS receiver gets a message from some strange short code (32665 (FBOOK)), and he's confused about who sent the message & who will get the reply if he replies."
Do you think Facebook is this much dumb that they will send you without the sender??
Your blog is correct at the base that they need the person to think like steve jobs. But they are not as bad as google in approaching things.
he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill.
Since when does it cost to receive SMS?
I think you have missed the boat on this one.
Facebook really isn't trying to fix email or sms, they are looking to create a cross platform mobile solution that aggregates short messages.
Just look at how a simple app such Kik has created a huge user base in a short amount of time. There really isn't much to the app but because they are providing the solution of connecting with your contacts no matter the platform they have tapped into a universal need.
With a 500 million user head start and engineering talent my bet is on Facebook.
Facebook isn't going to kill email, I am not even sure they want to. But calling it the new mobile messaging standard is bland. Email killer is what got us all interested and catches the email headlines.
Think of it as Blackberry Messenger that is accessible from the web, mobile or even sms and oh yeah all your friends already have it.
For many people under 21 email isn't just dead, it was never alive. This platform is built for them more than for us.
Who the he'll still uses sms? A significant number which is decreasing like crazy with smartphone. Email already integrates chat with email so this is redundant.
Furthermore, if you email me from fb Im going to ignore it along with all the bs farmville shit.
Have you used apple's mail client? it ain't the best by a long shot.
I'd rather entitle this:
"Why Facebook badly needs James Daly"
look: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html
Facebook is heavily drinking their social graph engineering juice. It's their differentiator, so they want to make cool things along that philosophy. It feels like their lockdown centered around that a lot.
Tough to say, only time will tell if it works out. Might just be ahead of their time.
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This is sad. None of your points make sense:
- "he will receive numerous SMSes from email users who don't realize that they're racking up his bill" - eh? Receiving SMSes from Facebook costs nothing.
- "If you send a message to an SMS recipient and 2 email recipients, what happens when the email recipient replies-all?" - that's not how it works. You choose the people you are messaging, and then if you want you can opt to have them notified by SMS as well (assuming they've given Facebook their phone number) if you think it's important enough to warrant it.
- "In the Facebook UI, you can add people to the conversation & they have access to all previous chats." - not true. You can't add new people into messages or chats. Just into groups (so they can see the group wall). Groups and Messages are different services.
- "Facebook threads all conversations with a person into a single thread. Even if the threads are about different subjects (since Facebook demotes the email subject to the body). All this means is that your chat with Fred about his travel plans and which TV to buy get weirdly interleaved into a huge chat session." - no, this won't happen (going forward) because the conversation is always in a single thread. When you are chatting to someone, you don't keep flipping topics. You talk about one, then the next. If you end up alternating between two, that's entirely up to you and not Facebook's fault.
- "99% of real humans don't care about this" - rubbish! We all have to subconsciously remember which way to contact which person etc.
- "Teens always text each other, because they always have their cell phones & this is the way to reach them. And to reach your grandma, you use email. Simple." - no, not simple, because you have to remember which is which, and you have to keep switching between technologies to keep in touch with everyone.
"the new Google - a technical powerhouse that can't build usable software" - you are hilarious!
"Someone who thinks, "what problems do people have?" and then solves those problems"."
They've done you one better: they've got an Eric Schmidt!
I quote: "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
Who needs to solve problems when you can be creepy?
"Since when does it cost to receive SMS?"
Since when you are in the United States. It's about the only place in the world where it costs money to receive SMS. Somebody get us off this carrier-based mobile system
Interesting post, but I don't agree.
"But 99% of real humans don't care about this, and won't experience his 'relief' because this was never a problem in the first place."
It's a problem for me, and becoming more so. I'm sufficiently old-school that I use e-mail for pretty much everything. Yet people still send me Twitter DMs. People still text me. People send me "private messages" through a whole bunch of networking and forum sites I'm registered with.
In each case I have to use the shitty interface of each system to reply, when I'd far rather use my nice e-mail client. And if I try to find an old message that someone sent me a few months back... that gets real tiresome real quick.
If Facebook can abstract this away into a single system, I'm all for it.
(Or rather, I would be, if I used Facebook...)
To people who keep saying "SMS doesn't cost anything," that depends very much on the cell phone plan you have. With an AT&T iPhone, for instance, your plan might have 0, 200, 1500 or unlimited SMS messages a month. Both sent and received messages count toward the limit, and no, Facebook messages are not exempt. (You think they're going to pick up the tab for you? Please.)
As to whether or not "abstracting away the transport" is something that "real world" people care about, time will tell. But ask yourself how many times you've slapped your forehead and said, "Damn, I can't remember whether Bob prefers email, AIM, or text him! If only there was a service which kept me from having to remember!" Yeah, perhaps this is solving a problem that we just didn't know we had -- you know, just like Google Wave did. How'd that work out?
(And as to Dave's implicit claim that Google makes usable software: with all respect, I hope you're not a UX designer. Google iterates toward usable software, but do you love the UI of either Reader or Gmail? Google Docs? And I ask again, how'd Google Wave work out?)
You're missing the Big Picture. Fact is, there's not a corporation on Earth that wouldn't be improved by putting Steve Jobs in charge.
I think you're basically wrong.
Abstracting out transport layers is a very good idea. Whether it's well-implemented is another story. Does SMS cost $ per message? For some people in the US, yes, for most people no. In any event, a neat abstraction layer would simply truncate messages that were too long for a single SMS and provide the recipient with a simple mechanism for seeing the rest of it.
Sure, teens "all" use SMS and boomers "all" use email, but hey some of us need to communicate with people in more than one demographic. And, I, for one, don't neatly fit in one of those boxes. Nor do most people.
I both agree (with Facebook Email needing to be more Apple like) and disagree (regarding the type of response recipients get). Recipients can specify the type of response they like to receive, be it SMS (which could be one of many free SMS services for smartphones), email, and/or Facebook smartphone app.
Samurai: Every smartphone user I know uses SMS messages.
Many of them also have internet-based IM software, but very few of them use it nearly as often.
So, no, not buying that. SMS has various advantages -
Low bandwidth and doesn't need Internet access, which is useful when data is expensive (international roaming), or nearly absent (middle-of-nowhere).
Always on on every phone at all times; no need to make sure the battery-hogging Chat App is running.
Universal support automatically just by owning a phone. No accounts, no setup, just a phone number. (Also a portability disadvantage, though these days who changes phone numbers?)
Assuming you know who you want to contact, this was never an issue to begin with. If I want to invite my friend Mark for coffee and I have 10 different means of reaching him, I probably know which one is most suitable at the time.
I read somewhere that according to FB email is difficult for people because of the subject. WTF!? Again, if I want to tell someone something; I probably can think of a subject.
And how can this system know better than myself whether to text or IM my friend? This is not exactly rocket science to figure out myself now is it? Will something I wanted to text him go to IM because he left his IM app open on his computer when he left for work?
I'm not in the US so the issue of receiving text messages costing money is irrelevant here.
"Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs"
I'd rather have Jobs working on something more compelling than a glorified address book and guestbook
Complete FAIL.
SMS = cost (US carriers charge for incoming) and potential annoyance/SPAM.
That alone will kill this thing.
"...real user problems."
Am I not a real user? As I do use this. I use FB messaging a lot, I use FB chat a lot. Having a history of all my conversations will be useful to me.
But, don't worry, I'm not a real person. And neither are the Google engineers that have recently hopped jobs to Facebook...
The "new AOL" indeed, all they're doing is trapping people on their platform.
Facebook's API technology is horrible; accessing their/your data is either impossible or unreliable.
Unsurprisingly nearly all the comments are based on incorrect perceptions. I think once all the negative commenters get off their high horse and try it, they'd be pleasantly surprised. Instead, people who've never tried it will crow about how SMS charges (SMS isn't sent for every message if it's not replied from there), irrelevance (oh yes, nobody desires a more unified messaging system), and platform lockin (you can get out everything you've put into the system quite easily) will kill it instantly.
Get over yourselves. What have *you* done to better the Internet and the world lately?
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I like Google. I have use a lot of their applications.
I don't dislike Facebook. It is usable for me, but I do not use it for any form of messaging.
I definitely don't like Steve Jobs. His arrogance is shocking.
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I think what you're saying here is that Facebook would greatly benefit from Human Centered Design. Luckily there's a long-standing champion of this kind of work just streets away from them.
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