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by scorpion032 5690 days ago
"Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat."

Joel seems to wrongly assume that the preference is defined by the person alone. Whereas more often than not, the medium is defined by the nature of the message and the sender _is_ the best judge. - It is an opaque abstraction to not let me choose the medium to deliver in.
1 comments
ray_sun 5690 days ago
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.
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bad_user 5690 days ago
> 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.

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kristiandupont 5690 days ago
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?
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v21 5690 days ago
"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.

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bad_user 5689 days ago
> Delivery reports are pretty reliable with SMS

It depends on the carrier and on the sender ... most people don't get delivery reports back.

> Email, by contrast, hasn't got any reports that any decent human being would use

Yes it has, you can embed tracking pixels in it. Not really reliable though.

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scorpion032 5690 days ago
Yes. I should have added, I agree with the author. :)
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