What’s This New Fangled Facebook Messages?

November 16, 2010 · Posted in social media · 5 Comments 

It’s not email…apparently. It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Messages. Some call it the Gmail Killer, some doubt it’s viability at all and some are just confused by it. So, what is Facebook Messages?

Yesterday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced details of his one stop shop for all your messaging needs. It combines your email, text messages and chats with a strong focus on the social element of online communication. When you select a contact, you will instantly see your entire conversation history regardless if it was through IM, SMS or email. This adds context to conversations – we don’t just converse with people using one method and now all methods will be integrated. Facebook says, “it’s like having an ongoing record of your friendship”. Aww, how sweet.

So far so good! It sounds like the ideal solution for personal emails. However, Facebook are at pains to say this is not an emailing system. Despite the fact that you will now have access to a @facebook.com email address, the Messages service is designed to act more as a ‘switchboard’ for your communications needs. Zuckerberg stated that Facebook believes modern messaging should be “seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal”. “It’s not e-mail,” he said.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I happen to be quite fond of email. I like my Gmail account; I like having all of my different email addresses integrated into my Gmail account. I don’t think I’m quite ready to abandon emails just yet.

There is one area I can see Facebook outshining Gmail and that’s in the prioritising of messages. While Gmail has its Priority Inbox (something which is not as intuitive as they seem to believe), Facebook has its Social Inbox. FB knows who your friends are already. It knows who you converse with regularly. Your social inbox will likely only contain messages from people you deem important to you socially. Messages from everyone else will fall into your ‘Other’ folder. In fact, as with FB’s other functions and services, you can restrict who has the ability to message you – i.e. Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Groups, etc.

Why have Facebook launched this service? Well, with over 500 million current Facebook users, there’s definitely a market for the service. The pre-existing Facebook Mail is clunky and unintelligent, so a change was definitely needed. Furthermore, Zuckerberg explained recently that when he asked a group of high school students why they “don’t really use e-mail”, the reply was “it’s too slow”. Text messaging is near instant and Facebook wants its Messages system to reflect this.

Which brings us back again to the abandonment of email – “We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Zuckerberg said. For a system that claims not to be email, it looks a lot like email to me…

The Facebook Messages Inbox

The Facebook Messages Inbox

…except, not as good. Facebook Messages cannot replace email. It’s advantages will be in the instantaneous nature of the service, the swift responses, the quick back-and-forth. However, if you use email for more than short bursts of information (I definitely do), Messages won’t be for you. Granted, Facebook have purposely geared their service this way.

Every email someone sends to darren_byrne21678@facebook.com will go into Facebook Messages as part of a single conversation. If you end up sending me several emails about a variety of topics, I’ll see all of those separate emails as one conversation. FB Messages doesn’t have Subject Lines. Again, I see this as a huge flaw, while Facebook call it a design feature.

I can see plenty of advantages to Messages, particularly for personal communications, and, as an upgrade of their current Facebook Mail service, it is a huge improvement. But will it change how I communicate online? I don’t see it. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

Frankly, with so much still wrong with Facebook – the privacy settings, the user interface for Facebook Groups, the lack of message archive accessibility and the fact that there are still no email alerts available to Page Admins, to name a few – I would rather Facebook get their core product right before throwing a new one at us.

If you want to know more about Facebook Messages, go to the Facebook Blog or if you want to request an invitation, you can click here and wait a while. And don’t forget, you can follow the Irish Internet Association’s Facebook Page too.

For the moment, Facebook Messages is invite-only – and each person has a limited number of invitations to share. Are you using it yet? Let us know your thoughts on Messages. Will it work or will it go down in the annals of Internet lore, alongside Google Wave, Bebo and Boo.com?

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Make email better

June 26, 2009 · Posted in email marketing · Comment 

digdigThis month’s Digital Digest went out this week. It’s just under a year now since we’ve been using the Newsweaver system and we are really happy with it. It was especially useful while we were organising Congress as we had different groups involved in different ways: speakers, shortlistees, demonstrators and, of course, delegates. It really helped smooth some of the processes of communicating important information about Congress.

So it is with dismay that I read in my Campaign Monitor ezine (and about 2 seconds later in an email from IIA Member Pixel Design – thank you very much!) that Microsoft are planning to go ahead with their plan to use  “the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010″ as Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project put it.

I think Microsoft are doing lots of great things and I love and use some of their products regularly and happily. But I also love my ezines. I’ve been writing ezines for about eight years now and trying to keep up to speed on what works and what doesn’t in email. I know that many of the beautiful email newsletters that we see today came about from painstaking developing and care for cross platform/ browser/ email client compatibility. Email marketing can be really effective but it has to be able to relate visually to everything else a company produces online. It must reinforce that relationship so that even if a subscriber signed up on your site a week, a month or more previously, they will instantly recognise your brand and style in their inbox no matter what email client they use. You can read another interesting perspective on this issue on Long Zheng’s Blog who points out that while Outlook 2010 may have problems there are other email clients that are equally questionable when it comes to HTML rendering. If you do any sort of communication with your clients via email you should care about this issue and if you use Twitter you should add your voice to the campaign at fixoutlook.org

And if you aren’t emailing your clients em… right. I don’t know what to say to you. Try this for starters maybe?

UPDATE: 29/06/2009 (Thanks to @denisecox) Microsoft respond to the FixOutlook.org Campaign and the Email Standards Project respond.

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Dynamic conference feedback – without the gizmos

October 17, 2008 · Posted in events, Guest Blogger · 2 Comments 

A guest post from Chris Byrne in Sensorpro about a new way to serve feedback surveys at conferences.

For the Irish Internet Association (IIA) Word of Mouse conference, we needed a slick way to get attendee feedback.  As a survey vendor, it’s a simple task to deploy a survey with all the bells and whistles you would expect, like via email, popup, link, twitter post or embedded in a blog - but on this occasion we wanted something a little different. We wanted audience reaction in real-time without the expense and hassle of gizmos.  So how about Bluetooth then?  After all, many in the audience had a gizmo already – a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone (or cell phone, if you prefer!) Thanks to a snappy response from Shane at Mobanode we had our survey deployed on his Bluetooth box in minutes.  As soon as we hit the “fire” button, the survey was deployed to 23 phones with just 1 rejection – not a shabby response rate! Roseanne from IIA was live twittering – so she had the twitter world peeking over her shoulder. Not only did this method garner dynamic feedback from the immediate audience – but also picked up twitter eavesdroppers with the browser link. If you want to try  event feedback that is different, is relevant and a gizmo that actually works – then try this.

Edit 23.10.2008: Speaking of feedback, Aedan Ryan from Puddleducks.ie also attended the event in Limerick and wrote a review on his blog.

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The IIA welcomes tenders for email marketing communications

July 4, 2008 · Posted in Uncategorized · 1 Comment 

The Irish Internet Association invites tenders from member companies to develop a cutting edge email marketing communications application. The IIA wish to develop their email marketing to reflect the needs of their membership and improve communications with them.

Currently the IIA publish regular Event Alerts to notify subscribers about upcoming events and a monthly Digital Digest which summarises members’ and industry news, vacancies, appointments and tenders. The IIA hopes to improve on this model to ensure timely and relevant communications with its subscribers.

All interested parties should contact Roseanne Smith, Membership, Marketing and Communications Manager  at roseanne@iia.ie for the full tender document.

Closing date for completed tenders is 21 July 2008.

Only tenders from IIA members will be considered. You can join the IIA in four easy steps.

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Brand new shiny award for Brandmail

May 26, 2008 · Posted in Uncategorized · 6 Comments 

Click here to visit the brandmail websiteCongratulations to Brandmail, not because of their spanking new piece of silverware which they received at the All Ireland Marketing Awards for Marketing Innovation but for becoming the latest new member of the IIA.

There is no doubt that Brandmail’s product is innovative. Brandmail seek to protect their clients reputation by signing and sealing their email:

“When an email is sent, the SbS2.0 (TM) Writer “signs” that email using a cryptographic hash function. This cryptographic signature is the modern equivalent of a wax seal used by royalty to protect important messages – identifying who sent the message and verifying its authenticity. “

What an end user sees in their inbox is the sender’s logo with a Brandmail’s trademark secure icon beside it, the sender being a Brandmail client. It’s a simple yet effective way to boost trust and as Brandmail themselves say:

“A brand is more than a trademark, it’s a trustmark”

You should visit their site - they explain it so much better than I can with pictures. Their blog has some great posts as well.

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