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Comment by ajg1977 | Hacker News Reader

ajg1977

"It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. <snip> 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 sounds utterly retarded.

Which is more important to me - an email from ISP or phone company telling me I have a bill to pay, or an IM from a friend asking how my vacation was? Some of the most important emails I've ever received have been from people I wasn't previously acquainted with.

It's as if Facebook are trying to train people to spend all there time interacting with other Facebook members, doing Facebook-type activities. Everything else be damned.

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You aren't a teenager, are you? The interesting thing here is that if stuff like this takes off, when those teenagers grow up, they will start designing business applications that work like social media, rather than demanding that social media work like business applications.

(Yes, I'm recycling my own damn old ideas: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-...)

I suppose teenagers don't have many bills to pay.

And if the teenagers are trained well enough in the meantime, they just won't bother paying their bills when the time comes.... That might be interesting but I'm sure where the successful business comes in.

Now, if important messages in "other" box become visible along with the important friend messages, this might work but then its just a method of sorting. But if I'm never reminded of anything but the latest gossip from the my friends, I don't think I'll survive well outside a teenage world.

The way I read it, this new type of messaging will only replace a part of why you use email, the part where you communicate with friends.

The other part will remain unchanged, and email would eventually become much more like snail mail is today -- a formal medium for communicating important notices, like bills or legal actions.

The new Facebook messaging system would sort of merge all of your communications to/from friends over email/IM/SMS into one type of much more informal communication.

It seems a little confused really, about whether it will be all of your communication or part of your communication...

But with more methods of electronic communication continually evolving, it seems unlikely you'll ever have a single stratification of messaging systems.

You pay bills?

Bills are going the way of the fax machine. They'll probably always be around but for most people dealing with a bill will elicit a reaction of the "A fax? Why don't you just send it over on a dinosaur?" variety.

I don't know anyone in their 20s that hasn't automated almost every payment. (For some reason the electric company won't allow me to, they're the only ones that still send me bills.) Most of my stuff goes onto my credit card and my credit card pays itself out of my bank account. I just need to log in periodically and look at statements to make sure no one is screwing me over.

I don't want my personal inbox cluttered with crap like bills. The sooner we get rid of that stuff the better.

Caveat: That was all on a personal level. If you're running a business your inbox preferences change dramatically and that's ok. We don't to force everyone into a lowest-common-denominator middle ground.

This is a convenience for those who don't live paycheck to paycheck. Many families, myself included, are, at times, forced to pick and choose what to pay on time and what is going to have wait a week or two. Living beyond my means? Perhaps, but I'm hardly the minority.

That's a great point you make. Why can't your electric/phone/water company allow you to make those choices online? After all, they want you to pay the bill, but they'll take 'at some point soon' rather than immediately, over never.

Bills are just an example of "important communication from those outside your circle of friends".

Only someone has a rather low level of responsibility in the world is not going to get anything of that sort - though different people will have get a variety of different sorts.

What?!

Their inbox allows you to differentiate between messages from people you know and people you don’t. It consequently makes messages from your ISP or phone company more visible.

Ok, so your correspondence with your friends is full of junk and stupid memes? Since that important ISP invoice will be in the “Other” inbox you won’t have to wade through all that junk! Filtering messages based on whether you know the people you are messaging with is a perfectly reasonable and clever idea. (It’s not even novel or creative. Google’s priority inbox does something similar.)

You know that the Facebook hate has reached new heights when a comment that makes no sense at all is the first you read under this story.

They're not targeting you - they're targeting the demographic that think that Facebook IS the Internet. Most of these people are not that interested in networking with new people, or being introduced to new opportunity. To me, it seems they are most interested in chatting with their friends about the latest gossip, or what's going on the upcoming weekend. I`m sure Facebook backs up this position with adequate data.

Unfortunately, I can only make assumptions but I would love to see some data on how the typical Facebook user tends to use Facebook vs the rest of the Internet; should anyone have any.

>they're targeting the demographic that think that Facebook IS the Internet.

thank you man, to me it sounds like an eye opener. "Hook them while they are young".

Email is a horrible solution for notifications, and I'm surprised people would defend it.

1) Oops, that important message got sent to your Spam folder.

2) This is a two-way medium, but "Please don't reply to this email."

3) "Now that we have your email address, we can send all sorts of promotional messages. Yay!"

4) Phishing.

That's why I have more than one email address.

I don't think this is really an accurate description.

I think that they are trying to help make personal communication easier, which might mean also helping filter your inbox between Personal (how was your vacation?) and non-Personal (Your Phone Bill Statement).

They aren't telling you to not pay attention on the latter. Just providing a tool which helps you focus on the former, if you want to use it.

Pass this bill along to 10 of your closes friends.

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