It's not email. The audience question and the answer about jokes from your Mom clarify:
This is person-to-person conversations.
The concept is that all communication between you and one other individual is an ordered sequence, regardless of the channel. This aggregates all channels into one person-to-person timeline.
The biggest issue I see with it is uncertain latency. Email is low latency, SMS medium, and IM high. With the demo today, it's not clear how you can know when to expect someone to respond.
Their example of leaving an IM w/o having to say "brb", and seeing the notification on the phone, is great for the receiver, but not so great for the sender, who doesn't know why latency just went through the roof.
Email is "high reliability" (as high as anything today).
IM is "low reliability" (it's not expected that you be respond to an initial chat).
I'm actually thinking that Facebook has "really stepped in it" by now making an effort to "be everything". It's more acceptable for Facebook messages and invites to be easily ignorable when you have other ways to contact people. But if you're not seventeen and you want your Facebook page to be everything, there will be some hard problems to solve (assuming you have a job OR customers, you'll want offer pretty reliable ways for them to get in touch).
When a company gets a lot of market, they want to differentiate their products so people stop using the standard and gets locked into their "standard slightly modified".
No no no, It is not an MP3 player(anyone could make an MP3 player), is an Ipod.
No no no, It is not email, email is an standard and we don't want to have to compete with other companies on a levered field, it is the facebook messaging event.
As usual they will make it very easy for people to get in, not so easy to get out.
"I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea."
I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against you by other people. Bad things could happen when you can't control it(friends of friends could see that)like you could control on gmail.
"I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against you by other people."
It seems you don't have a girlfriend... ;-)
Having dispatched of that softie: IMHO, too much history is a bad thing. Sometimes one _needs_ to forget stuff from the past before one can move on.
A prime example of too much history is the Middle East, more specifically, Israel-Palestine.
Really? It sounded nothing like Google Wave to me, but I will readily admit that I really didn't know what Google Wave was. This just sounds like a system where people choose how they send you a message and you can choose how you receive it, using Facebook as the intermediary.
The problem is that this is private communication and I don't trust Facebook to do private communication well. I don't trust that my drunk email to an ex girlfriend won't somehow be accessible by someone else, so I won't use it. I'm sure a lot of other people will though.
It's not a good sign if the main thing people take away from a presentation is "This is not X".
It doesn't sound like it's as terrible an idea as "Wave" but since messaging is much more core to Facebook, a confused and barely successful product could hurt Facebook more than Wave hurt Google. But perhaps I'm letting my biases creep in.
Aggregating electronic communication protocols is great - it is going to come. But I don't that a single aggregation process is going to do for everyone any more than a single messaging system would work for everyone (disclaimer: I'm working on a protocol aggregating project myself). Like computer to computer protocols, person to protocols vary in their speed, their richness, their reliability and their latency. And appropriately so. Tying them together into a meta-protocols is great but any effort to create a single meta-protocol which "solves" all the speed, richness, reliability and latency problems results in a "monstrosity" which solves none of the problems.
So this is going to be aggregating all communication in Facebook?
Sounds great - the problem is that it's Facebook arguing they should be able to do the aggregating but will take active steps to stop anyone else from doing said aggregating (say, suing companies that combine multiple social networking streams).
