Facebook's Messaging Lock-in
Facebook announced today its new "seamless messaging" product. From the announcement:
It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. ... With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder.
This seems completely backwards to me. Some of the most important email I've ever received has been from people I've never met. Why should a random message from a high school friend -- someone with whom I interact only rarely -- have the same priority as a monthly bill that's more likely to require my immediate attention?
Facebook continues to try to force all your communication to center around interactions with other Facebook members, in this case at the expense of sensibly prioritizing your messages from people, objects, and systems that are not your Facebook friends.
Then again, as with most of Facebook's new features lately, I suspect I'm not their intended audience. I deactivated my account yesterday.
