Random quotes, images, and thoughts from Ed Ireson.
We can politik about Facebook all day long, but one thing that is strikingly well-done by Facebook is their communication platform. They recently introduced the standalone Facebook Messenger application, which allows users to communicate, regardless of the technology they use. You can SMS, send an web-based message, use the mobile app, use a Jabber client, or email.
The Facebook messaging platform has to be one of the most effective systems that ignores the underlying technology, and empowers users to use the method that requires the lowest barrier. Dumb phones can use SMS, my parents can use email, I can use the mobile app on-the-go and the Jabber client at work. I’m freed from having to worry about choosing the right technology to get ahold of someone immediately. I let Facebook worry about that.
My only fear, is that people will shy away from it, because it is a closed loop system. What would be extremely interesting is to see Facebook publish an open standard that allows other vendors to integrate with this messaging platform. Y!, AOL, Verizon, etc could release apps and integrate into their existing systems. The goal here being the lowest possible effort on behalf of the end user. The user should not have to figure out what device is closest to me, or most easily utilized by me. The technology should take care of that.
(The caveat to all of this, is that I often get multiple alerts for a single message. My iPhone gets an alert, Facebook.com chimes, and it comes through on Adium. There is a balance between being intelligent about where to display the message to me, and not delivering a message to the right device. For now, I prefer it to get it across all mediums, than to miss a message because it only showed up on my work computer and not my iPhone.)
