Jeff Bonforte, chief executive of Xobni, which lets you search your Outlook inbox and organises mobile address books, comments on the context: "Yahoo! and Hotmail made it global and free. Microsoft made it work for business with Exchange and Outlook. BlackBerry made it portable. And Gmail took off the storage limits, which, lucky for them, increased the need for better search. Facebook announced this morning they intend to make two more contributions. They will make messaging social and, undeterred by Google Wave, more realtime."
Real time he's not so fussed about (or, he'll let other people fuss about): "To me, the biggest announcement is making messaging social, or socially aware as we say here at Xobni."
He thinks this is too big a chunk to bite off: "Even armed with the identities of over 500M users, Facebook has a big challenge in using social data to make messaging better. In fact, their blind spot might make the problem worse in some regards. The reason is the size and breadth of the index matters. Facebook's perspective is too narrow. First, it is focused, primarily on our personal relationships, and more importantly, it is heavy in explicit (public) data and light on the more important implicit (private) data."
He points out that the identities of people can be dual: "Facebook tells me that the number one 'Damion' I know is the lead guitarist of a big Journey cover band. Kind of right. Except, Damion, to me, is my painting contractor, not a guitarist playing next week. This is similar to how Linkedin incorrectly (for me) identifies Nancy as the Director of the Turf Club in Del Mar. She is that…but of course to me, she is my Mom. And Facebook doesn't, actually, know her at all."
AllFacebook has the lowdown on the technology behind the announcement: "MySQL proved to not handle the long tail of data well; as indexes and data sets grew large, performance suffered." Instead it works on HBase, which is modelled after Google's own internal BigTable product.
SearchEngineLand explains how it works
Charlene Li thinks that the implications include migration away from traditional email ("today's numbers look like this: 350 million active Facebook Messages users (not everyone on Facebook uses Messages. That's compared to 363 million Hotmail users, 303 million Yahoo Mail users, and 171 million Gmail users") plus an "elegant way to consolidate everything in one place".
A key point she does note: "The underlying assumption to Facebook Messages is that you have a real relationship with your Friends. I expect that Facebook will keep refining how messages are prioritized within the Friends inbox (for example with Friend Lists, recency of interactions), but it highlights the importance of being someone's friend in the first place.
"For example, if you want to gain access to a key person, becoming their friend now has tremendous value as it gets priority treatment. Anyone can send an email to charleneli@facebook.com, but it won't reach my prioritized inbox unless you're my friend."
That latter might be the biggest difference about this. But will you be happy for your sensitive "email" to be hosted on Facebook?
