Dear Facebook, Please Let Me Reply to Your Message Notifications
Do you know this problem? Someone sends you a Facebook message. You want to reply, but instead of being able to just hit reply on the message, you have to perform a multi-step choreographed dance:
This is hugely annoying. Instead of sending emails with a nonsensical address such as notification+pd=edfz@facebookmail.com and a Reply-To of noreply@facebookmail.com, can't Facebook just implement an email-reply-to-Facebook-message bridge? This is pretty simple to do - many Support systems (e.g. Kayako) already do this.
I've written (well, sketched) about Facebook vs. email before. When I have some time, I need to sit down and write my rant about how closed (Facebook, Twitter, Skype) and proprietary (Google Wave) systems are replacing email when they shouldn't. I think the underlying reason is that email's systems and protocols (SMTP, IMAP, MIME/RFC822, MS Exchange) are so hugely sucky, outdated, insecure, spammy, bug-prone, and stupidly designed. We need to engineer ourselves out of this mess.
Update: Wow, this post was just in time for Facebook's Message API, which makes the whole problem worse, not better: From the TC article: "The biggest addition — the Mailbox API — is also disappointing because it only lets users receive messages, not send them."
- Click on the link in the email
- Log into Facebook
- Navigate Facebook's messaging interface to reply
- Repeat this procedure when new messages roll in
This is hugely annoying. Instead of sending emails with a nonsensical address such as notification+pd=edfz@facebookmail.com and a Reply-To of noreply@facebookmail.com, can't Facebook just implement an email-reply-to-Facebook-message bridge? This is pretty simple to do - many Support systems (e.g. Kayako) already do this.
I've written (well, sketched) about Facebook vs. email before. When I have some time, I need to sit down and write my rant about how closed (Facebook, Twitter, Skype) and proprietary (Google Wave) systems are replacing email when they shouldn't. I think the underlying reason is that email's systems and protocols (SMTP, IMAP, MIME/RFC822, MS Exchange) are so hugely sucky, outdated, insecure, spammy, bug-prone, and stupidly designed. We need to engineer ourselves out of this mess.
Update: Wow, this post was just in time for Facebook's Message API, which makes the whole problem worse, not better: From the TC article: "The biggest addition — the Mailbox API — is also disappointing because it only lets users receive messages, not send them."
Labels: email, facebook, IMAP, random thoughts, rant
4 Comments:
I am so with you. I organized tweet up a few weeks ago and had to communicate with 3 other people on 3 separate systems. Ugh
please join http://facebook.com/group.php?gid=65260935900
I normally just hit the "reply" button when I get the email and change the "To" to the actual address - much quicker.
that dance bugs me too, but facebook is making money off ads on their site, right? so the dance is good for them, bad for us.
I can't imagine them making much money from their "Inbox" functionality.
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