Don't you wish you'd thought of Facebook?

Facebook Messages? A new app or a revolution in communication?

Joel Seligstein writes on the Facebook blog,

"the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

The Social Inbox

It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

Facebook stats:

• More than 500 million active users on Facebook
  
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

• More than 70 translations available on the site

• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

What comes to mind for me with the Facebook email potential is that:

1. You have to be where your friends are. It's called social media for a reason. If that's where your community is, then it makes sense you'll have a presence there too.

2. Privacy is a huge priority for most people in their email. Can Facebook turn their reputation around? Reality is something altogether different, but Facebook's reputation is that there has been some question as to privacy issues and the access they, third party apps and hackers have to personal information.

Will 1. outweigh concerns over 2.?

500 million people will decide, intentionally or not, and Facebook will continue as a decider
in social media, or become a dinosaur replaced by another visionary's must-have app.

LifeHacker says, "A little more than a decade ago, web-based email products overtook the messaging scene. These days, SMS messages and social network pings are replacing traditional phone calls for many—at least in the hyper-connected first world. Perhaps Facebook's deep integration with your friends and contacts, and its ability to provide greater context and pre-loaded media for messages, could stage a similar revolution in email."

Then Lifehacker asks you to participate in a survey; whether you'd move to an email service provided by a social media site, i.e. Facebook.

One of the funny things for those of us who remember CompuServe, AOL and before is that none of us could have predicted then what we are doing now. See stats above.

We can only guess how the iPad has and will change things. Look at the pervasiveness of mobile phones, with cameras and browsers, and what people have learned to do with them.

I take a photo of the table in the Consumer magazine that tells me which bread is best for me. I then check that photo on my phone when I'm buying bread. What would my grandmother have thought of that process?? She wrote her list out on a scrap of paper and carried it in her handbag.