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Dec 29

Facebook finally giving me my messages where I want them

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People are keen to jump on Facebook whenever they do something “wrong” (e.g. the Facebook Beacon debacle). Companies are going to make mistakes, especially when they are finding their way in a slightly new world, and are trying to work out the boundaries, and how to make money.

It is good that the community keeps a watchful eye, just as people are ready to pounce on Microsoft over IE and monopoly-type things, and even my company, Google. These companies have a lot of power, and a watchful eye can be a very good thing.

There are certain features that users have been glamouring for, and it appears that Facebook is slowly adding them in.

One of my pain points has been a simple feature. It drives me nuts to get emails like this from services:

“Dion, someone left you a message. click here to get it”

Just show me the freaking message. Some claim that it is smart to do this for page view purposes, but that smells bogus to me. Do what the users want, and it will be better for you. In this case, it has already been better for Facebook that they changed this, and I now see my Wall and Fmail messages:

Facebook Messages

Why has it been good for them? As I now respond! I participate more! Next, they need to let me reply to the darn email to write back instead of going through FB again. Forget about forcing me onto facebook.com and let me use you as a real platform. With the Bebo announcement, it seems like they are getting it, and doing good things. I hope that 2008 will have a very different look to social networks, and we will move to the hard part of getting data portability in a way that makes sense for users.

I never want to have to enter contact/friend information again.

One Response to “Facebook finally giving me my messages where I want them”

  1. Sumit Says:

    It’s ironical that you comment on this Facebook irritating lack-of-feature when Google itself has the same drawback. Orkut sends the same pesky messages when somebody leaves a scrap.

    Or have people in Google given up on Orkut?

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