Facebook announced last night that it was adding search to the Inbox feature of its site. According to Facebook engineer Prashant Malik, Inbox search was something the company knew they needed for a long time, and was heavily requested by users. Search is one of the fundamental features that any email-like messaging system needs, and adding it is significant for Facebook because it takes the Inbox app once step closer to being a viable email replacement for users. Facebook is already the ultimate address book for many users, so why not make it a more usable messaging tool as well?
The reason it took Facebook so long to add search, said Malik, is that the company "wanted to take the time to make sure we built the right solution that would scale to support everyone using the site." MySpace recently adopted Google Gears to encourage users to search and sort their emails offline, which will almost certainly make the service easier to scale.
Image via Inside Facebook.
Facebook's Inbox is still a long way toward being a "Gmail-killer" -- or any other full email option killer, for that matter. Though the site does email full copies of messages -- a practice it began last December -- and though it lets users send messages to email addresses, it still lacks many of the "must have" features of an email client. Message organizing features, for example, are almost non-existent, as is the ability to reply to all recipients of a group message. There's also no way to reply to message sent from Facebook via an outside email client (i.e., the way you can reply to Basecamp message by replying to the notification email), nor is there a way to send messages to Facebook users from outside email clients (the latter is an effective type of spam control, however).
For some younger users, though, messages on sites like Facebook and MySpace have already supplanted email as the defacto method of asynchronous communication on the web. Our own Bernard Lunn argued last week that LinkedIn could do the same thing for him and Outlook by adding more robust messaging features. I've long argued that Facebook could transition into a network suitable for business, and better messaging capabilities is definitely a step in the right direction.
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I don't know why Facebook don't do more work in this area, they seem very slow to add features to this. It's clear that messaging of any kind is popular especially when a lot of people have everyone they might want to email already added on facebook.
Though I worry about them censoring it (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_censoring_user_messages.php) .
Posted by: Richard Cunningham | June 20, 2008 11:07 AM
Messaging is an awesome way to increase stickiness of the service. I'm surprised they pursued IM first, especially with all the buzz around the concept that "your communication pattern is more valuable as a social graph than your friends list". Facebook should start with supplanting the most important communication protocol of the internet: email.
Posted by: Q dub | June 20, 2008 2:28 PM
I agree with Josh: this is definitely a step in the right direction.
I'm a college student. During the academic year, I'm a bona fide addict of my school email inbox. But, during the summer, my school emails drop from ~30/day to about 5/day (and those are mostly spam).
In the summertime, I facebook message like it's nobody's business: finding a subletter, arranging furniture purchases and transport, keeping in touch with friends who have recently graduated-- all done on facebook.
I'm pumped that they're starting to add more messaging features with this step... can't wait for more to come!
Posted by: Lauren | June 20, 2008 5:11 PM
Definitely a cool feature -- but personally I don't get that much Facebook messages that it would prove to be useful to me. This is great for those individuals with 500+ friends though.
Posted by: web design company | June 20, 2008 7:37 PM