Facebook Is Too Cool for E-Mail

Posted on Nov 15, 2010

Facebook

Facebook is trying to reinvent messaging—just don’t call it e-mail. Yeah, you’ll get an @Facebook e-mail acount, but as CEO Mark “Maaaaark!” Zuckerberg says, “It’s not e-mail.” Instead the new platform will collect your entire messaging history, including instant messages, e-mails and SMS texts, in a socially-aware conversation view.

And then Facebook’s director of engineering demonstrated why this is a terrible idea.  —PZS

The Guardian:

Demonstrating the new tool – after making his own, apparently obligatory, “it’s not email” preface – Facebook’s director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth, pulled up his personal chat history with his girlfriend, saying that he was really jealous that the “next generation” would be able to see their entire conversation history with their own partner or friends.

Whether this next generation will want to see every single utterance they have ever exchanged with their incumbent is a different matter – one can imagine good reason for not recording some heat-of-the-moment remarks for all eternity.

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