Here's an idea for Facebook. Get rid of subject lines in messages | Hacker News Reader

Here's an idea for Facebook. Get rid of subject lines in messages

blog.tlb.org

32 pointsprakash15 comments

I always write useful subjects in Facebook messages and so do all of my friends. Taking them away would make my Inbox unusable because of my primary use case: organizing groups of people for some future activity or series of activities.

Right now I have recent messages in my Facebook inbox about a fundraiser this weekend, a series of local concerts happening this fall, a class reunion next summer, and several group activities from the past few weeks. Additionally, I have ongoing one-on-one conversations with two different people.

Since some of these conversations include the same people, not having a subject to identify which thread is which would make them unusable. I'd just see a list of messages and have no way to contextualize them in conversations.

I think the real key here is that my Facebook messages are almost always a part of long-term conversations, not individual messages.

It appears you are using the subject line as more of a meta-data type tool to organize your events. Wouldn't it be better to have the ability to organize and message events rather than manage all this through the messaging services?

I'm not sure adding more structure is always useful. When I'm throwing a party for 30 people at a set date and time, I use event organization software, like Facebook events. If I want to get a feeling for my friends' thoughts on the local concert schedule this fall, I want to have a conversation with them. And the subject, as in email, is meta-data about a conversation, not (necessarily) the content of the conversation.

Google wave is trying this, see preview video

They could also make the darned "Reply" link easier to find! It takes me way too long to find it every time I want to reply to a message.

Do many people use messages on facebook? Most of the activity I see is wall status updates, or wall->wall.

The point of messages is that you can't see them, unless they're to/from you.

Sure, but then the only advantage over email is if you don't know someone's email address but have them as a friend on fb.

So I can really see the value of status updates, wall->wall posts etc, but messages? meh

i'd say that's a pretty good advantage when you have a few hundred friends from throughout the years and don't have their email, or they don't have yours, or perhaps you don't want to disclose yours

I like it. Ideally the title would be optional, and if left blank would replaced by a snippet of the message.

Sounds like messages mean to be tweets.

In some cases that might be true, but I'm observing a lot of communication among people my age (mid/late twenties) that used to happen over email is moving to Facebook. I'm Facebook friends with a number of people that I spend time with regularly, but I don't have their email addresses.

Here's why: it's harder to give someone your email address than to become Facebook friends with them. For email, you have to write down a long string, keep track of it until you get home, and correctly type it into a computer. For Facebook, you just say, "Are you on Facebook? Are you friends with Jon? Just look me up on his friends list."

Facebook is a resource for contact information. Most people put it on their profile.

Inside of Facebook, I think that's true. Despite the superficial similarities with e-mail, I think Facebook messages are more like long-form tweets.

I get this same problem in playstation 3. Everyone just sends messages in the title cause it shows up on their screen.

I don't think we don't do it to look like we're not trying to hard. I think we don't do it cause we're too lazy to come up with a title for a quick message.

The title should just be automatically made from the first few characters

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