re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.
Yes, that is my point. Abstracting away SMS vs. email is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it doesn't solve any user problems. The sender is the best judge of what transport to use. It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today.
> It's unfortunate, but it's the way the world is today.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.
Email is asynchronous. IM and SMS are disruptive.
And on IM versus SMS, the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message, while the default behavior of IM is to notify your contacts list if you're online.
These are different mediums people use for different kinds of communication / contacts.
But I don't expect Facebook to get this, especially considering their total disregard of the way people interact with one another. It's a wonder they are number #1, but I guess the alternatives sucked a lot more.
I agree with the different mediums part of your comment but I fail to see how fb is "disregarding" the way people interact with one another. Clearly, they understand that very well and this is the primary reason for their success?
"the sender of a SMS usually doesn't know if the recipient received the message" - is this true? Delivery reports are pretty reliable with SMS. I know some people use them and some don't but I'd be curious to see the figures. Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being would use. And IM is somewhat different again, in that it broadcasts availability, as opposed to receipt.
But yes - different methods of communication have different semantics, as Marshal McLuhan never said. But it is nice to group them, and to be able to seamlessly transfer between them. No doubt I'd love Google Chat's "This person is now offline. Click here to send a SMS" if they had any support for anywhere but the States. And I look forward to the Sense UI concept of crossing the streams coming to stock Android so I can use it myself.
in response to bretthellman: Zuckerberg is sharp, and he filled a user need with the status update / news feed. But now he's hired a bunch of superhackers, and they are tending to solve superhacker problems. The problem is that superhacker problems are not the same as real user problems. This is the difference between Apple & most other tech companies.
re: Apple Mail, it just depends on who you ask. If you prefer Gmail, then Facebook could have mimic'd Gmail UI instead. The point is that unifying the different transports doesn't solve a real user problem. It's not like people are having problems sending email or SMSes to each other today.
It doesn't solve a user problem per se, but it may make it more convenient to have a 'one stop shop' for managing all of those things.
Supermarkets carrying things other than groceries (e.g. lightbulbs) didn't necessarily solve a user problem (i.e. people just went to the hardware store for light bulbs), but that decision was still a win for supermarkets.
