Just pokin' around

Facebook just announced their new messaging system, which is impressive. It integrates SMPT, SMS and IM into the regular Fbook message system to create the first ever "social inbox". Facebook develops truly elegant, robust features and boasts the most widely used API on the face of the planet, both for commercial endeavors, as well as those of the less ambitious kind. I think this will become very popular and only increase their market share in the socially targeted ad space. It also allows them to test approaches to find traction in the undeveloped market of SMS commercial content, something that has absolutely huge upside, but remains an essentially open market. However, it's success will not be due to any significant new tech or product innovation on their part. It will be because of Facebook's user scale and penetration into the mid to late adopters market. My Gmail account can already email, chat, text (you have been able to do this since the advent of the email gateway) and recently, even call people. So technically speaking, Google is on the leading edge here, and with their VoIP, still ahead. But Facebook, by maintaining a minimalistic design conducive to developing brand trust and maximum accesibility, has by far the more consumer friendly iteration. And they certainly play the PR more effectively. This should be no surprise, it's in their DNA. It's not as though Facebook invented the social network, or even the Facebook, a staple of universities across the country up until a few years ago. Their strength is a team with a gift for building simple, clean, engaging UIs that make all others' seem unnecessarily complex and cheesy by comparison. Myspace feels like the used car salesman of social networks, assualting the user with pop-ups and pushy promos; Facebook is the new Volkswagen dealer, it's just good, effective engineering (and to complete the analogy, LinkedIn is clearly the Beamer dealer of the bunch, eschewing 'friends' for 'connections'.) The bottom line is that no other potential provider of integrated messaging has the scale or brand of Facebook, because of their UI. Fbook messaging should be a solid double, broadening their revenue channel significantly while challenging the established market, but it lacks the true innovation to be a home run.