Everyday I have to write tons of emails in a similar boring pattern with “Hi Mary”, “Dear Lily”, “Best Regards”, “Cheers”, whatsoever. Is there anyway to make our conversation more simple, connected, time-saving and just “to-the-point”? Suddenly, the Social Inbox idea raised by Facebook few months ago came back my mind. With all the myths, debates and its recent activation. I am so much looking to find out how it could change the ways of communications we have currently by bringing a social world to your inbox. Will it be a revolution or just another Google’s ill-fated Wave? I'm longing to find out...
For those who have no idea about this social inbox, here is a quick wrap-up. Pls be noted that it is just available recently by invitation for limited users.
- A combination of the most popular forms of communications (e-mail, text messaging, Facebook's own private messaging and instant messaging) into one convenient and flexible feed.
- This Social Inbox has convenient features such as storing coversation history by contact, dividing inbox into two parts to filter emails from whom you don’t really know.
- The benefit for Facebook is that it already has 500 million users who are addicted (on some level at least) to the social network’s messaging system, and many of them are probably like the high-school students, and don’t use email.
A few things for discussion:
- Email-killer? - On the face of it, having just one place to communicate with everyone from coworkers to family members seems like a good idea. But is Social Inbox considered the future of email or online communications?
- Individual identifier? - Now everything we have on Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, blogs, discussion forums, etc. are linked via email, by default. That is, it comes back to that unique identifier that marks me out as an individual. But will this social inbox really work when it comes to the integration with other channels?
- Privacy? - Even Mark Zuckerberg told people that Facebook will protect users’ information in this social inbox and not use it for any advertising purposes, people are still always skeptical about the privacy issue on the social environment. Will this be another challenge for Mark on the ongoing privacy debates?
