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:

1. Click on the link in the email
2. Log into Facebook
3. Navigate Facebook's messaging interface to reply
4. 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the underlying reason is that email's systems and protocols (SMTP, IMAP, MIME/RFC822, MS Exchange) are so hugely sucky, outdated, insecure, spammy, bug-prone, and stupidly designed.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."

Reviewing YouTube - in 2005

I was playing around with TechCrunch to see how far it goes back (a review of Technorati seems to be the oldest article on the site).

While I was browsing, I found quite a gem - an August 2005 review of YouTube:

• "YouTube is very much like flickr, but for videos."
• "The service has recently been launched but seems to have quite a few users who have posted lots of content."
• "I suspect YouTube will be quickly acquired and/or duplicated. We love it."

A bit more than a year later, that prediction turned into reality, and breaking that story made TechCrunch the premier news source it is today.

Crassness

Lots of famous entrepreneurs and scientists are known for almost blindingly tough feedback. "This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard," they say. One well-known Internet leader is known for canceling products just before launch because "sorting my socks by color is more important than releasing this." How arrogant.

I'm starting to wonder whether this is actually learned behavior.

First, they learned that smart people love honest feedback. Smart people want to improve; When faced with criticism, they work hard to make it right. Delivering feedback in a needlessly hard-hitting way makes them work even harder, thus producing better results. Which in turns makes our fearless leader more successful. And more arrogant.

Just my random thought of the day.

A Second Look at the Google Favicon

Update: Thousands of people are flocking to my site today (May 30, 2008), because Google changed its Favicon to a lowercase "G". This blogpost is a totally unrelated random musing; Google Blogoscoped has the story of the new icon.

The Google favicon is playing tricks with me. This is what I think it looks like:



Looks very serious and corporate, doesn't it? Just the first letter of the well-known logo, surrounded by a grey box. In reality, though, it looks like this:



The UI artists in Mountain View probably couldn't resist making it all colorful, just like the logo itself.



Am I the only one who fell for this?