Recently Facebook has announced that they are unrolling a new messaging service which aims to consolidate email and SMS into the site. While this seems like a good strategic move for Facebook to entrench itself as a communications provider, I have some doubts as to the service.

Email is Beautiful

Facebook has introduced their Messages feature as a strong alternative to email, however there are a number of areas where email is still superior.

Subject Lines

During the announcement of the service, Mark Zuckerberg complained of the "friction" and formality of email. In order to reduce this "friction" Facebook has decided to do away with subject lines. In Facebook Messages all correspondence from a single person is in one single thread.

This seems a step backwards since having all your messages lumped together in one place would make it exceedingly difficult to sort messages or find a specific piece of information. Email currently offers the subject line as a strong tool for managing messages.

Other, more utilitarian, messages such as those pertaining to e-commerce transactions would likely be mismanaged under the system that Facebook proposes. Facebook assumes all the messages you receive are of equal importance while in reality each message has a distinct (even if unstated) priority.

Easy Access

Email is based on open protocols meaning that anyone can write a client to read messages, and messages are easily transferred between mail systems. You can easily check your messages from anywhere using a number of methods including web interfaces or dedicated email programs.

Using Facebook Messages you are restricted to checking your messages on the Facebook website. This lack of flexibility proves problematic since Facebook is the second most blocked site on the Internet, meaning that depending where you are and what computer you are using your inbox may be inaccessible.

Should you ever decide to leave Facebook, it is unlikely that Facebook will provide any functionality to export your messages to another service or system. This is very different from most email services which let you export and import messages at will. Historically, once you start using Facebook you will be stuck using Facebook unless you want to lose your message history.

Matters of Trust and Image

Areas that Facebook has historically had trouble with are security and privacy.

Security and Privacy

Facebook is increasingly being used to distribute malware and the recent news of information being shared with third parties have done little to endear Facebook to me. It seems odd that someone would want to move more of their communications to a network that is not only a known vector of infection for malware, but also has significant breaches in privacy.

Facebook stands to gain from decreasing the privacy of its users, since the less privacy the users have the more directed advertising can become. More directed advertising will benefit Facebook by generating increased ad sales and higher revenue. This naturally, will occur to the detriment of the users.

Image

To many people Facebook has a bad reputation. When you are applying for a job or attempting to otherwise impress someone, it is vital to ensure every piece of information you offer about yourself conveys the correct image. If you are applying for a job in business an email address ending in "@facebook.com" totally fails to convey any image of professionalism.

Conclusion

While much press is being generated over the launch of this new service, the inferior service it provides and poor reputation of the provider actively discourage me from wanting to have anything to do with it.