The rumors about a Facebook email product have crescendoed in the last week, ahead of a Facebook press event happening today in San Francisco — and we’re here, live-blogging it.
Will it be a full-featured email service of some sort, or just a partial upgrade to its existing Message system? See our previous coverage of what we and others have heard, what the product might look like, and what the results might be for more.
The answer, as you can read below, is some of both. Facebook has created a revamped Message Inbox that combines email, text messaging, instant messaging and its existing service to create what it views as a new form of one-to-one communication. Our product overview is here, and our analysis of how the product can do things like spam is here.
The following is paraphrased in some parts.
Live Blog
9:59 Mark Zuckerbeg has taken the stage.
Talking to high schooler — email is too slow, they complained. It’s too formal, the weight and the friction, having to think of an address of a person. Think of a subject line. Write “hey mom” at the top to introduce it. Write “Love, Mark” at the end. What do they use?
“We use SMS and Facebook,” the high schoolers tell Mark.
“How do you find out?”
“We’re already on Facebook.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
They’re using much simpler forms, lighter weight. Built handful of products for modern messaging system.
Around 350 million people are using messaging on Facebook, because it’s a really simple system.
There are more than 4 billion messages sent every day through the Facebook system — messages, IMs, private, private sharing that goes on in the service. How people are social, sharing things. Publicly, everyone in their community.
Vast majority is one to one between two people. Not Pages or anything, but one to one, very simple communication.
We tried to graph out.
We tried to make other features stable, faster.
10:05 What we think the problem space is. Modern messaging system won’t be email. Bunch of characteristics to it.
Seamless integration across all the ways that you interact with technology. All the different channels that you might want to use — IM. Informal. Having formal adds cognitive load, people don’t want to share quite as much.
Immediate. Real-time communication like IM and some SMS.
Personal. SMS is high signal to noise. Very likely someone who you care about. Email, there’s a ton of stuff in there.
Simple. We should take features away, not add.
Short. Make it so they can share in shorter bursts.
These are some of the characteristics we should cover today.
1. Seamless messaging.
You can have .com messages, but not primary way.
Goal is to make it so that we can seamlessly integrate.
2. Conversation History
Spreading model — archaic. Subjects, threads. In real life, you have a conversation with them. Our view is that a lot of the more modern communication vehicles that people are using.
Make it super simple. IMs, emails, messages, go into that. Five years from now, a full rich history. Friends, things around you.
3. Social Inbox
Really good filtering to only show what you care about. Sophisticated. Really good at getting rid of real junk. Lots of different classes of junk. Really difficult for you to know if you should care about what they have to say.
People have acknowledged white lists — but it hasn’t really been practical to do that.
10:10 You get messages. Social inbox.
Really high default experiences for you. Not junk. Really compelling experience.
These are the three things that we think create a modern messaging system.
Seamless integration. Email, but not only email. Contacts all in one place. A social inbox. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
1. Seamless Integration
Engineer Andrew Bozworth is on.
One of the first things we thought to do. Chat and messages. Text to SMS. Email, Facebook.
Take all the conversations, all the messages back and forth on different devices. Throw them together, between two people. Email, they should be able to do that. Match their public user name. Facebook.com
Everything else works perfectly fine without the email.
As much as we are providing this email address, the system is definitely not email. We’ve actually modeled it more after chat. Example:
My buddy Ben is browsing around, pops up on chat, could ignore his message (about getting lunch), that sounds pretty good, but I can’t remember the place we’d been talking about. That sounds like what we want to do. Press enter key, sends by default. After that I leave and he’ll get on his computer.
10:15 Email user, forgot to pick up friend Anne. Push notification. Respond in Facebook. Launching iPhone app along with that today.
Works with a whole range of technologies. Works just fine.
Integration:
- Jabber XMPP)
- IMAP (on the way)
- Facebook API
2. Conversation History
When we were planning this, my Grandma has this. Letters written by my Grandfather when they were dating. That kind of thing is rare. Where is mine? Locked up in phone, email services… until now.
This is my actual conversation history with my girlfriend going back four years.
Doesn’t include email, doesn’t include text messages. Not just being romantic, this is just nostalgia. If the last three were “I miss you, I love you.”
Even if I had a bad day, what will my next message be. Individually not profound, but collectively form a conversation about someone I care a lot about.
We had to rebuild infrastructure that the product was built on.
Invested heavily in key value store called Cassandra. Tested with MySQL, not sure how it would perform with lots of data.
Rebuilt infrastructure to hBase. We worked closely with open source community, built internally.
10:20 Also extended Haystack infrastructure. Every Christmas Momma sends out a spreadsheet of gift lists.
Supports attachments. We use Thrift, Zookeeper, memcache that we built from the ground up to support.
Biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together — 15 engineers.
3. Social Inbox.
Seen a message from my mother — bank statement or bill. We have an opportunity to organize by who you care about. By default, you’re going to see messages from your friends and their friends only. If your grandmother, their friends, wind up in other folder, you can move to the “Messages.” Otherwise it’s in “Other.”
I want to get these things, not what I care about. We expect users to always be engaging with the Messages folder.
One of the last things that is really powerful about social graph, when applied. Once we get an email up, a phone number, it’s lost. I don’t have a chance. But with Facebook, we can do much better, from security by obscurity to genuine control. If you can change your settings to bounce any email — but they didn’t have the one thing that matters, the social graph.
Provide a place where people can have conversations with the people they care about.
10:25 Zuck is back on.
We don’t expect to kill Yahoo Mail or whatever
People’s habits are changing, maybe email isn’t as important before. Maybe we can push people towards a more seamless, real-time personal message.
Rolling out slowly over a period of a next few months. Starting with invite system. Press is in initial set. Get you feedback as we’re doing that.
Now Boz and I will answer questions, or try to.
The full announcement here.
Q&A
Q: What about multiple people?
Zuck: We don’t think that’s the way the world is going to go.
Q: What about other email, IM, how do you decide which goes in.
10:30 Zuck: One of the complicated things that we had to work out and iterate on a lot in the last year. For example, if you have been interacting with someone through email, we’ll send your replies back through email. A person can trigger through interface. Maybe in the future we’ll know if they have an iPhone app, Android app and deliver that way.
Make it really simple and lightweight. A lot of nuance, that we call the “policy engine” for messages.
Boz: To try to make it so it feels like a conversation.
Zuck: So they don’t have to think about this stuff.
Q: Like VoIP?
Zuck: Maybe over time, but we wanted to unite the four because they’re basically text. We’ll see how users ask for, how they use the product, one that we just wanted to take before we started working on the next set of things.
Q: Have any advertising? Content targeting for ads? Effect over time with rivalry with Google?
Zuck: Like other relevance we do. There’s nothing specific about that (that they’re talking about today).
I think Gmail’s a really good product.
We’re retiring the gigabox system in exchange for the new tighter system that we’ve built. In reality, a tighter product and how people are changing their communication.
Boz: Use Gmail, cool. Doesn’t matter what service they use.
10:35 Q: Gmail has a nice feature chat function where you can delete.
Boz: Users can delete.
In other systems, email and IM are two different things.
Zuck: Our system, more temporal. On the other side, they’re receiving SMS. People can obviously say “I don’t want this message stored.” In terms of separating out email and IM. One of the things we’re doing is converging — we concluded that the metaphor didn’t make sense.
Q: What is the biggest challenge that Facebook has had to date.
10:40 Boz: I don’t want to fight about which was the biggest challenge. But we put a lot into this. If we’re doing our job well, it’s very much what they’re used to. If they’re used to IM, chat, Jabber, all those things will work the same way. Hopefully provide a place that feels more ongoing. A more continuous conversation.
Q: How do you have control over communication? You archive forever?
Boz: Yes, we want to make sure people communicate with whoever they want to. Shouldn’t preclude people from using the service that they like. If on Facebook users have this expectation that they’ll have conversations with the people they care about. What do they do with that?
Zuck: If you’re not part of the Facebook system, it’ll go into other. We expect that that problem can very quickly get solved. Put this person in my main folder. That person sends me an email.
Q: Content filtering. She likes to send a lot of forwards of cat photos, is there further filtering you can do on the content side?
Zuck: No, but there’s only going to be one thread with her.
Q: As you’re adding, what happens to messages you don’t get on Facebook.
10:45 Boz: Store email address as list of contacts. We have to do that in order for the product to work. I think that’s what you’re asking.
Q: What happens to corporate email addresses?
Zuck: After a long discussion, the farm bureau has agreed to give us Fb.com. This is a big conversation internally. Our philosophy is so important to the people who use the product, we should really give them the best. Fb.com seems reasonable, and that’s what we are. After today, fb.com.
Q: If I have people on my Facebook account, happens to be Facebook friends. But more casual, not Facebook friends. I use a separate email account, Yahoo.
Boz: Anyone who’s already your friends and friends of friends.
Q: Before, Facebook was about expanding to new connections.
Boz: Goal for Facebook was never to expand, it was to map it out.
Q: Text messaging?
Boz: Already built, but if you don’t want to do that, you can choose not to.
Q: Filling in any holes? Associating anything with profiles?
Boz: This email address is actually my friend — ok. But send as SMS, can send. If that person doesn’t have SMS, we’ll give the option of inviting them. “You’re friend wants to send you an SMS but you don’t have it configured.”
Q: How much storage space? Forwarding?
Boz: Yes to forwarding. Among most requested for Facebook. Very selective, let’s you select which ones. Add ability in group conversation. Add to thread, delete from thread. Something that we’re not going to give a specific number — way modern message systems are going.
If you’re a good user, and using this thing without using it. For people who try to find limits, they will find limits. If you’re using appropriately, you’re fine.
Q: Primary? Way to redirect to Facebook?
Boz: Goal is easy way to communicate with someone you care about. Any plans to reroute internet? Make sure our protocols work with those. We’ve certainly optimized for this to be focused on friends.
10:50 The event is over.
To preserve the privacy of a user’s inbox, applications won’t be able to message users at their @facebook.com email address, which can easily be determined from a user’s vanity URL or user ID. This creates a layer of protection which can be penetrated by a user’s friends and other humans, but not by applications looking to send unsolicited email.
It will take all the communication between two people, regardless of medium, and show it in one thread. Users will have an @facebook.com email address with their public vanity URL as the prefix. However, the new Messages will look more like Chat, with messages added to threads in real-time and the option to instantly reply. “Our goal is for it to feel like a conversation” says Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth, “people should share however they want to share.”
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