A day after launch the BBC quoted the engineering manager in charge of the messages product. He was not optimistic:

I think we will have a little bit of an adoption problem…We’ve noticed that even for us, it takes a week or two before you really grab on and get this system.

What really happens in the cloud of data? How private and protected (confidential) is your data and how well is it protected from manual processes that could corrupt it (affect the integrity)?

Every time we turn on a new set of users we have to move their data from the old system to the new system – so one by one we have to run that process. Right now we are moving the first set of users over.

That does not sound well designed. He says it was really started as a way to copy the iPhone SMS interface to their site:

We were also frustrated about how SMS works. And we were fascinated by how the iPhone works. How those things funnel into Facebook. We wanted to do the same things for people without iPhones as well. We really wanted to pull those communication channels together and the rest kind of fell into place

That certainly explains why there are no subject lines. They, of course, are calling it the next generation and a big change, etc. but I have yet to see any discussion of the security features in the system. Subject lines do more than just add overhead. They create segmentation. Where do users need segmentation most to protect their information? In the cloud, on Facebook, and in communication.

What do I mean by segmentation? Remember when you could tell that a message was spam because of the subject? It provides an additional data point that separates the wheat from the chaff, the Alices from the other Alices. The cost of SMS makes spamming on it prohibitive (or so I’ve been told endlessly by the carriers). What is proposed for the control framework on Facebook Messages, given they have adopted the iPhone SMS user interface (which, to be fair, was an adaptation of the Google Mail user interface) but removed the controls that are inherent to SMS and email?