David Notik

Email has been king, but it's in many ways an archaic technology, and attempts to evolve it have been increasing. By some measures, more people now interact via social networking than by email and for good reason. Social networks offer rich insights into who people really are and give you better control of who you really want to communicate with (goodbye, spam). Your friends and their activity are already there, and so it's only natural to start a conversation in the same place. A social network that is big enough is like a global address book, letting you find someone by name to instantly send them a message. And since you've presumably already defined who you care about most, you can see messages from them first.

With 500 million users, Facebook is the ultimate social network and is in a unique position to take this concept forward and create a robust messaging system. Lo and behold, and widely expected,, they just announced a new Messages feature that looks like it gets a whole bunch right. Center conversations around people, eliminate subject lines and make starting a conversation easier and less formal, and even centralize some of the disparity across email, instant messages and texts. And it seamlessly integrates with email, even giving you the option of being reached at an @facebook.com address. It's well thought out and leverages the strengths of a social network that's supposed to know about who you want to be communicating with.

A revamped Messages feature is just as important as Facebook's recent fundamental revamp of its Groups feature, which begins to let you mold your social network based on how you really interact in the real world. Together, these features begin to transform the social network destination into a really useful communication tool.

While Facebook is adding more robust communication tools to its social networking platform, Google is set to add more robust social networking to its communication and collaboration tools, and thus we have what I think is one of the most important battles for dominance in the future we're creating.

There is no question in my mind that Google is working to leverage its Gmail success and is building an integrated communication tool that is beyond email. (I'd wanted to write a post titled "Google Wave is not dead" making the case that the technologies you previewed in Wave will in fact make their way into a more integrated tool -- it was only "killed" because Google quickly knew that it had no future as a standalone and sprawling product.) They need more social glue to be able to solve the big problem that Facebook has just addressed -- that is, they need to know more about the people you want to connect with to be able to offer more control and less spam -- but if and when they do, they've also got a reputation for creating the best productivity tools that they're sure to back up.

Facebook's greatest strength (i.e. that it is a social network) is also its greatest liability. It's a social destination, not associated with the more mature tools you use day to day in your productive lives, and so it'll be a hard sell convincing people to bring the important people and communication in their productive lives into Facebook. If it can do this successfully (and Groups is a big step towards addressing the problem of "everyone's equally my friend") and if it proves it can create more robust productivity tools (they've got nothing on the scale of Gmail, Docs, Picasa), then Facebook stands a great chance of winning in a future that is unfolding, a future beyond "social" networks towards "actionable" or "collaborative networks".

For now, though, Facebook will remain a social destination. By the looks of it, I'll probably do more communicating via Facebook (and many will choose to do the bulk of their personal communications there), but I won't be prepared to migrate my productive communication in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Google can wow me with a more network-aware Gmail and a more integrated suite of products, ensuring that they remain the leading provider of the powerful, productive, collaborative tools that are such an important part of our cloud-based future.

Who do you think is in the best position to become the de facto center of your communications in the future?

Update: Here's a full set of screenshots of the new Messages experience on Facebook. It's rolling out slowly over the next few months.