New Facebook Messages Service

Back in November 2010, Facebook announced plans for a 'social inbox' – a place that would serve as a hub for all communications that people use online or via mobile phones, ranging from text messages and chat messages to email messages, too.

 

This week Facebook began releasing Messages to more users and will continue to do so over the next few months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he intends Messages to make communications more "seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short".

Subscribing to Messages might not be for everyone - after its announcement, Facebook users expressed skepticism over its promise to simplify communications and cited Facebook's flawed privacy track record. Experts, however, say that while the adoption of Facebook's take on unified communications will be slow, it is a growing trend.

Here's a detailed look at Messages and its features for when you gain access, and a few cautions before you sign up.

Before you start

When you sign up for the new Facebook Messages, you're assigned a Facebook email address. All messages sent to this address will appear in your Facebook Messages inbox. How you use this email address and inbox is up to you - for some, it may become your primary account where you receive retail offers, emails from friends and family or even bank statements. But for others, it will probably become a convenient way of keeping all communications with Facebook friends - whether it's a message, chat, email or text message - in one spot.

It's important to note that anyone who knows your @facebook.com address can send an e-mail to that account, whether or not they're a Facebook user. When someone sends you an email from external systems, such as Gmail or Hotmail, they're formatted to look like your messages on Facebook, complete with your name and profile picture.

Also, consider this: many Facebook users have probably checked out a handful of apps, whether they're games, photo-altering apps or business-focused apps. When you use these, you grant the applications permission to access certain information and message you. That means these applications will now be able to message you via your Facebook email address.

Finally, note that once you set up a Facebook email address, it will always be valid - you cannot deactivate it. You can, however, change its privacy settings. The strictest setting allows only your Facebook friends to contact you via the email address, all other e-mails will receive bounce-back replies.

Getting started

When you gain access to Messages and log in to your Facebook account, you'll see a pop-up notification offering to upgrade you to it.

Clicking on 'See What's New' will prompt you to activate your Messages email address, which is your Facebook URL @facebook.com. If your Facebook URL is facebook.com/johndoe, your Facebook email address will be johndoe@facebook.com. After your email address is activated, you'll be brought to the Messages home screen.

Set your privacy controls
Your new Facebook e-mail address is not viewed publicly on your Facebook profile. If you do wish to share your e-mail address with your Facebook friends, choose My Account > Settings > Change Email. Here, you can change your default email address and add your Facebook e-mail address if you wish to make it public.

Do note, however, that since your email address is the same as your publicly viewable Facebook URL, anyone who can see your username (such as in a search) will be able to figure out your Facebook email address. You can change who can search for you on Facebook under your Privacy Settings.

Navigate the interface

The Messages home screen is populated with conversation threads you've sent and received via the original Messages since you joined Facebook. Clicking on a friend's name will display the message history. Also from the homepage, you can change the status of a message to 'read' or 'unread' by clicking on the circle next to the message's date, or delete the message thread entirely by clicking the X.

Sending a new message
To create a new message, click the button at the top. To send this message to a Facebook friend, begin typing his or her name (it will autofill). To send a message externally, type in the email address.

The message form also lets you attach a file, take a picture or video, or send the message via SMS. Once you send the message, it will be visible in a conversation thread under the recipient's name.

Adding and removing people from a conversation
If you start a conversation with more than one person, Facebook gives you the option of later adding people to the conversation. If you do this, the person you add to the conversation will be able to view the entire conversation thread. To add a person, click on the Actions drop-down menu and choose Add People.

If you have previously started a message thread that you want to add people to, note that you may not be able to do so until all of the people involved in the conversation have switched to the new Messages.

Similarly, if you were engaged in a conversation with multiple people and no longer wish to receive updates to the thread, you can choose Leave Conversation from the Actions drop-down menu.

When you sign up for the new Messages, Facebook gives you 10 invites that you can extend to your friends. Access these by scrolling to the bottom of your Messages homepage and choosing 'Invite Friends'.

Understanding the two inboxes
When you use Messages, you have two inboxes: the main one, called Messages, which stores the communications with your Facebook friends, and another called 'Other', which collects messages deemed 'less important', such as Facebook Groups you belong to and external email addresses that you have not yet approved.

If you wish to have correspondences from contacts sent to your regular Messages inbox rather than Other, open the message and choose Move to Messages from the Actions drop-down menu. The next time you receive a message from this address, it will be sent to your main Messages inbox.

Set your privacy controls: If you want to modify who can send you Facebook messages and email, visit Privacy Settings, then View Settings and choose 'Everyone', 'Friends of Friends' or 'Friends Only'. All other messages will receive bounce-back replies. Changes to this setting may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Turning on text messaging

When you sign up for a Facebook email address, you're also prompted to turn on text messaging. You'll be asked for your country and your mobile carrier, then to text the letter 'F' to 32665 (FBOOK). When you receive a confirmation code, enter it in the space provided. Be wary that the 'Add this phone number to my profile' box is automatically checked, so be sure to uncheck it if you don't want that information public. But before you choose to add your mobile number, here are a few things to consider.

Once you turn on text messaging, the texts you exchange with friends are incorporated into your conversations along with your message and chat history. Friends can check the 'Send to Phone' option when they send you messages. If they do, their message will be sent to your phone, and a copy will remain in your Messages inbox as part of the conversation. If you reply to the message via text, your response will also appear in your Messages inbox.

To send a new message to a friend via text, use the following format: enter 32665 as the mobile number, then 'msg (person's name) (and your message text)'.

Set your privacy control
If you turn on text messaging, visit your settings to preview and change permissions. Do this by visiting Account Settings > Notifications. Here you can check and uncheck whether you receive texts when someone sends you a message, adds you as a friend, posts on your wall and more.

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Will MySpace survice

You might remember MySpace, for a while it looked like being the world's most popular social network. Of course things didn't quite work out that way. Arguably more of the more extravagant acquisitions of the Web 2.0 age, founder Tom Anderson's pet project was bought up by Rupert Maxwell's News Corp in 2005 for $580 million and never looked forward. As Facebook gained traction by spreading virally through university campuses, MySpace's uptake began to slow, turning it from a place to find people into a place to find music, magazines, TV shows and original Web series. While Google would outstrip News Corp with its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube the following year, MySpace showed that communities could be commodities in and of themselves, proving themselves rich pickings for bands looking for their big break (Arctic Monkeys one case in point) or for marketers looking for a direct line to the youth market.

The post-acquisition years, however, have not been kind to MySpace. Hammered not only by Facebook but a proliferation of niche networks its user base has stalled at a grand total of 66 million users. While hardly out for the count, comparing this figure with 69 million users for European network Badoo, 117 million for the ailing Bebo; 100 million for Orkut; 91.6 million for Russia's Vkontakte; and 200 million for China's Qzone; you can't help but wonder where it all went wrong.

Ask anyone suffering from a bad case of the Facebook bug and they'll tell you they're not on MySpace because: a) none of their friends are there and b) there's not much to do if you bother joining. Part of the success of Facebook has been its developer-friendly attitude, especially in its embracing of third party applications and casual gaming. Believe it or not game developer Zynga's flagship titles Farmville and Mafia Wars are responsible for over $1 billion a year in revenue - and while users are buying virtual tractors and birthday presents on Facebook they're spending more time on the site, improving its ‘stickiness' and increasing the amount of time users will be exposed to ads based on the personal information they so willingly shared by setting up their accounts.
So how does MySpace make up for years of decline? It gets a makeover.

To be fair this is something of an oversimplification. Yes, MySpace has acquired a new logo and a fresh page design that looks considerably neater than previous iterations, but the current revamp goes much further than its previous strategy of mimicking the biggest player. Visually the new MySpace owes more to the likes of iGoogle and MyYahoo in its design. Each element is modular and can be moved about the home page and docked based on personal preference. Activity walls will be dynamically updated like a news feed to display friend activity in real time and trending topics from around the Web will be shown so users can keep up with the global conversation.

Bonus
What's more impressive about the new MySpace is the shift away from focusing on connecting people to people to connecting people with content, thus reinventing itself as a personalised entertainment platform. While some of the new features have yet to be fully explained - ‘content hubs' for example - it's safe to say that there's not actually much going on that hasn't been seen before. The absence of geolocation updates - all the rage since Foursquare came to prominence - is a notable absence, but if the direction is more about people as curators than people as actors this could be excusable. The one major criticism the content-based approach was tried before by a network on the verge of greatness and fell flat: Bebo.

Bought out by AOL for $850 million in 2008, Bebo had just about struck a balance between social network and content platform until a disastrous American launch failed to generate any traction in the US market. A busy press release section on Bebo.com shows there is life in the site yet, but AOL still sold up in June to hedge fund Criterion Capital Partners for a figure reportedly less than $10 million.

What MySpace doesn't have to worry about is a costly launch into a new market, but the rush to retain its membership base - let alone attract new ones - will have it straddling the gap between being hip while retaining a populist outlook attractive to marketers and media buyers. Still, with revenues of $385 million reported in 2009 it could be said MySpace is in a stronger commercial position than Bebo, despite having only about half the population.

Will the new MySpace work? Well, like everything to do with it since 2005 you can't say what it's up to hasn't been done before, but it's not a tried-and-tested formula. Can MySpace do it better? That's up to the members to decide. The ones that are left, anyway.

 

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NEW Facebook Group Feature, adds to groups automatically

The problems started on Thursday, the day after Facebook revamped groups, giving users a way to compartmentalize their Facebook lives and post certain items to pre-designated groups of people. That's when technology blogger Michael Arrington, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis all found themselves added to a group called NAMBLA. It wasn't immediately clear what this page was set up for, but NAMBLA is an acronym for the completely unsavory North American Man/Boy Love Association. (For South Park fans, it refers to the National Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes).

Mahalo CEO Calacanis quickly fired off an email to Zuckerberg Calacanis quickly fired off an email to Zuckerberg saying that he was troubled to have been added to the group without being given the opportunity to opt in.

That was followed by general confusion, with some reporting that Facebook's new feature could be used to unilaterally add anyone to a group.

But that isn't the case. The groups feature now lets users automatically add existing friends to groups, but they can't do this with people they don't know.

How did Zuckerberg get added to NAMBLA then? That's all down to tech blogger Arrington. "I typed in his name and hit enter,' Arrington wrote on TechCrunch. "He's my Facebook friend, I therefore have the right to add him."

Arrington added that "as soon as Zuckerberg unsubscribed I lost the ability to add him to any further groups at all, another protection against spamming and pranks."

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that group members can only add their friends to the group. "If you have a friend that is adding you to groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend -- and they will no longer ever have the ability to add you to any group," she wrote in an e-mail. "If you don't trust someone to look out for you when making these types of decisions on the site, we'd suggest that you shouldn't be friends on Facebook."

Facebook Friends can also send messages and tag photos of other friends. Neither of these features has generated any type of outcry.

Arrington himself was added to the group by someone named Jon Fisher, one of Arrington's 4,824 Facebook friends. Fisher is also one of Calacanis's 4,740 friends.

Still, there is something disquieting about the way groups works, according to Chet Wisniewski, a senior security advisor with Sophos. He's concerned with the fact that people cannot opt out of the groups sign-up feature. "I'm uncomfortable with the idea that other people can determine what I display," he said. "The fact that it can't be opted out of, to me, seems a bit strange."

Facebook's groups Help Center confirms that there's simply no way to prevent people from adding you to groups. And the critics say that rather than being added automatically, friends should be given the choice to opt into any groups.

In a sign that Calacanis and Wisniewski may be onto something, online affiliate marketers have begun speculating about how the feature could be misused to drive traffic to marketing Web sites -- a current favorite form of Facebook abuse. "If you were to make a group named AT&T and decided to make a few 'official' Facebook spokesperson accounts to add to the fun, you could essentially launch a campaign offering FREE WIRELESS SERVICE FOR EVERYONE DURING THE MONTH OF OCTOBER," wrote a poster named Jon to the Wickedfire.com Internet marketing forum.

This Jon also claimed to have set up a fake NAMBLA page.

"Seeing as how crowd manipulation and influence over the interwebz is sooooooo easy already, plus tack on this as a social parody of sorts, and poof, you have yourself a publicity nightmare on a scale that would be spreading far more rapidly than any BP oil spill ever could," he added.

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