Facebook now informs the sender if you've read their message
facebook.com
facebook.com
Next up: Let you see who is searching for you / browsed your photo albums / etc.. ???
Very "badoo-esque" I think- Not that its a bad thing, it just feels out of place here. FB is not a dating site.
Though somehow I feel it's less creepy for "professional" sites vs. personal sites. I don't really care about coworkers looking for me, or if I'm looking at coworkers. But if it's friends from 10 years ago it is awkward.
Then, umm, don't add them as friends.
BBM has statuses for delivered (the message has arrived on the recipients device) and read (they have actually opened it). It's very very useful. You know at a glance where a conversation stands, you never have to "follow-up" to check a message arrived, you know if a message isn't in state D not to bother because they'll be out of reception, etc. It basically makes a BBM conversation much more natural than on SMS, or any of the big chat networks.
This completely ignores the reality of how people use Facebook, as if one could partition every personal relationship in your life into two homogeneous groups "friends" and "not friends."
Yes, I know you can have friend lists on Facebook, but this feature clearly embraces its uniformity.
So... you're arguing that people choose social networks based on more than the presence of a particular implementation of a single feature? Groundbreaking addition to your "all your friends are the same" theory.
The way people interact with other people can not be reduced to a finite set of values, such as "friend or not friend" or "family member, lover, friend, acquaintance, co-worker". In other words, this is not a Facebook vs. G+ dilemma.
The problem here is the fact that Facebook has, yet again, limited the way we interact with other people by imposing their own structure and rules: if you don't want a person to know you're paying attention to them, don't pay attention to them.
Your proposed solution of "don't add them as a friend" is even more restricted. Maybe it's your way of interacting with people, but I don't see how it's justified to try to impose it on everyone else.
Then people need to use Facebook differently. Seriously. What is hard to understand about Don't friend people you don't want to share info with?
This seems like common sense advice, like "Don't knock on the door of people you don't intend to speak to".
I perform triage on my work Inbox several times a day, even on weekends. I have "read" your "important" message, but not really. I've prioritized it for real review on monday afternoon, after I take care of important issues (as prioritized by me). It's better for me and you if we just pretend this moment never happened.
Being in the dark sounds like a bad thing, but it's not. It's better for my mom to think that I haven't seen the long message she wrote on Facebook. After all: who knows what I'm doing?
In reality, I'm fucking around during this conference on the distraction that is Facebook, I'm touched by her message, but I can't exactly reply until tomorrow.
I was struct by this yesterday for something seemingly completely unrelated.
I've ordered a new laptop. An awesome thing about the company I bought it from is that they show average build times based on recently processed orders on their website, presented me with a flowchart of their build process and time estimates (generic estimates), and displays the current status in their process for my laptop.
Being in the dark would have left me not thinking much about it, as usual.
Sometimes I'm even surprised when I get a delivery because I forgot I ordered something (even if I ordered it the day before, sometimes; I do most my shopping online) because it's a non-event, and I know it'll arrive when it arrives.
For a big item like my new laptop it might cross my mind now and again, but until a week or two from ordering, when they indicated it will likely be ready, I wouldn't think much about it.
But now, because I have access to the information, I check it several times a day to see if there's an update. Can't help myself. I keep wondering how far they've gotten. There's no practical benefit to me at all. And it's creating an expectation that wasn't there before, of something happening soon.
In retrospect, I might even have preferred not having the information.
Hence the addition of the FB "feature" in question. It's not for your benefit, it's for Facebook's benefit by boosting your participation.
In GSM networks _delivery_ reports are a SMS feature. You get a delivery report when the SMS is delivered to the phone.
BBM will tell you if a message was delivered successfully, but it's also capable of telling you if a message was read. The catch of course is that the user can control whether or not they want people to see if they've read the message. Ditto for iMessage.
I'd also add another issue that makes them bothersome - lots of times I read short messages via their incoming notifications which (afaik) doesn't update "read" status. So if I had read receipts on, I'd often appear to have not read something for hours that I actually had.
Not that these issues make read receipts for short messages useless and I suppose it's nice to have them as a feature for groups of people that want/need it for whatever reason, but I think opt-in is the right default for it.
Then, umm, don't add them as friends.
Extreme point missing: "ignore now" is different than "ignore always"
Mild point missing: Sometimes it is socially expedient to "not see" a message from someone while you are busy doing other things, even though you read and saw it. Much better than going through explanations of how, "gee, I'm busy, its not that i don't like you, just got other stuff right now, and no matter how important this is to you, my stuff is more important at the moment, ill get to you when i can", as opposed to "oh hey, just saw this, what's up?"
I'm sure you'll advocate for the former method, because of some crazy strict truth thing, and people should be less emotionally sensitive and blah blah, but the fact remains: people can be pretty sensitive. This little white lie makes interactions much smoother and avoids unnecessarily hurt feelings.
Actually that would be a very interesting feature because you would see your profile being "browsed" by all sorts of strange sources from all over the world. Most users simply have no idea how much this information is being scraped and analysed. It would probably scare some of them away from Facebook.
The feature itself is an old one that was around before Facebook. It seems to make good sense for a site like Facebook in the early days when it was primarily used by college students. But there is no way they would implement it now in my opinion because what it would reveal to users would freak them out.
Much like stating "linux has always been a workstation os" doesn't invalidate the people who only have used it as a server os.
As for saying that "Linux has always been a workstation OS" - clearly that is wrong. So yes, it doesn't invalidate those who use it as a server OS - it just means that it was never only a workstation OS.
But we had that feature from day 1; user expectations grew up around it. Introducing this kind of behavior mid-game is dangerous for all the reasons everyone's mentioned.
I'm one of those people who likes the little red notifications showing when I've received a FB message. I don't check FB's messages often, so without that notification, I forget to follow up on FB messages.
My work-around is to have FB send me an email notification whenever someone writes me a message via FB. Then I read that message in my email reader instead of through the FB UI.
I also have all email images turned off for performance and privacy reasons.
It seems to me you could do this too, and avoid having FB inform the sender that you've read their message.
The FB Messenger for Android is a tremendous app that I have been using, over other apps, ironically the main reason is because it's a nice chatting software which does not reveal if you're online and if you've read any message. Now I will have to look for an alternative - Google+ invisibility may be the one.
Delete your facebook account.
Most other causes of rash would allow that rash to reappear on another appendage. Only if the rash results from contact with something (poison ivy,etc.) would cutting off the arm 'cure' it.
This doesn't make a very lively conversation, and annoys the hell out of me. If someone comments my status update I have the email notification even sooner than the website tells me (can see from Gmail new email popup), but for messages I cannot enable immediate notification...... Stupefying....
Edit: Yes, here we go: http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-ope...
It's actually also possible to implement this in email, although the loading of remote images is disabled by default in Gmail. Any email which contains a link can point to a web service which notifies someone, "hey, this page was accessed."
Facebook apparently doesn't let you turn this off.
At the time, I believe the purpose was to engender a sense of trust in "the new medium of email." Obviously that's not the purpose of the implementation on FB.
So, what is the purpose?
Maybe it's the extremely late hour, but my cynical feeling is that this seems really a psychologically driven feature... driven by some kind of awkward, socially obsessive mindset.
So even if it's silly, the competition started being silly.
The logic behind using it to show if they fail or not doesn't work. The system that would identify if a message was sent would be tied into the messaging system; They should have this if it's possible, though they don't need to make the results known.
For those that want to be slightly evil, save all these messages in your archived folder, and at the end of the year - select all, read all: and you'll hear screams from across the office from all the guilty parties that attach read receipts as they will get their inbox flooded from all of your confirmations.
I always leave Outlook set to 'Prompt' me for read receipts. That way I know which people are annoying. I always DENY.
Read-Receipts have to be the most passive aggressive feature ever coded.
I rarely ever check facebook, don't have it on my phone, don't get their e-mails, etc, but haven't deleted it just yet because maybe there are some people from my past that I don't communicate with that I might like to some day.
People who are on facebook all the time don't understand that not everyone who has an account will always see their messages, and even though I've repeatedly told family members to e-mail me, they still try to send me messages.
This feature would help people to realize that I'm not actually reading facebook messages on a regular basis.
People that want to contact me, know how to contact me. Family members.. well they're not always the brightest bunch.
Does this move mean that FB has reached its saturation point and now the best way to instantiate more clicks is to prey on our insecurities? Who knows. However, it does feel like I've read this script somewhere before. If we're lucky, maybe next we can see how many times our profile has been viewed.
I loved having SpySpace installed, certainly made MySpace, and trolling friends based off the contents of their clipboards, a whole lot of (somewhat nebulous) fun.
I don't see it as being that much different to read receipts or any other form of messaging software
People have different expectations when using this software. I think I've logged on once in the past 6 months. A heavy user who sends me a message and expects, but does not see, a read receipt may think I'm deliberately giving them the cold shoulder.
I want the freedom to not respond or read in privacy. Let them think it was spam filtered or lost in the shuffle.
Yet another reason Facebook is not for me.
Anyhow, this is all just proving the point. Read receipts introduce a piece of "evidence" that is bound to be misinterpreted. So I don't like them and they're yet another feature hostile to some customers in Facebook.
It annoys me to no end - being old school enough to finding it completely acceptable to send a question to someone over IM, and expect them to get it and deal with it later, while many of my co-workers etc. will start any IM conversation with "are you there?" or "hi" and expect a back and forth to confirm this is "live" before telling me what it's about, and effectively removing the choice of dealing with it right away. That's a substitute for the system telling them the message has or will be read.
With that usage pattern - as a slightly less intrusive substitute for a phone call or face to face encounter - knowing that you're not talking to an empty chair helps.
This change effectively shifts Facebook messages further towards the IM spectrum away from the e-mail/letter spectrum. Many e-mail systems support read-receipts, but most people never use them, exactly because a large part of sending an e-mail is that you acknowledge the recipient may want to deal with the message in their own time, or perhaps not at all.
And that's probably why Facebook wants this change: To increase user engagement by getting users to feel more of an obligation to reply and to reply quickly.
fb should make it an option in the privacy settings, as it is with email systems where you can opt out from the message receipts.
I'm not entirely certain of what my opinion on this sort of thing really is.