Facebook Messaging Event: My Favorite Question

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So I am watching this event - the event of the day, the event of the week - and the talk this past week has been that Facebook is about to release a Gmail killer, and the talk this past month, maybe this past year has been that Facebook is eclipsing Google, and there is some talk Facebook might make it hard for FourSquare - FourSquare stole an engineer from Yahoo months back, Facebook stole an engineer from FourSquare recently - and Mike Arrington never stopped harassing Carol Bartz, TechCrunch recently put out an "infographic" laying out how Yahoo is hemorrhaging, and Time Armstrong made news when his company is not even 1/10th the size of Yahoo but he wanted to buy out Yahoo, and people have been on a lookout for Jerry Yang - where is David? - and one person at the event asks Mark Zuckerberg this question, so, my Facebook friends are not my real friends, they are just casual friends, and all my closest friends are on my Yahoo Mail account, and how is this new Facebook Messaging going to alter my life, are you telling me all these not so real friends I have on Facebook are going to be able to message me now?

Facebook Messaging: Awesome

You don't go after Google with search like Bing did. You go after it from an angle. Call it social, call it Facebook. And so I had no idea what Facebook's Gmail killer application would look like. That was the metaphor that had been making the rounds. Facebook is not calling it email. Facebook is calling it messaging.

Facebook Blog: See the Messages that Matter: Between mobile devices and the Internet we can be more connected today than ever before, but there is still a feeling that the technology can also act as a barrier between us. .... the next evolution of Messages ..... You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. ..... All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS. You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation. ..... From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." .... It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement...... Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you. ..... Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other.

Facebook has not disappointed. The expectations were high. They have been met.