For those who haven't been paying attention recently, Facebook has just unveiled its new social email system. Intended to integrate chat, SMS, email, and Facebook messages into one single conversation between you and the person you converse with, it's designed as an alternative to email for people who don't use email.
Loosely translated, if you're anyone but a high school student and Facebook addict, it's probably not for you. If you're used to having conversations thread by topic and not just by person, it's probably not for you.
Facebook designed their 'email' solution after talking to high school students who indicated that they didn't use email, on the grounds that it was "too slow."
I find this entertaining, because I've always felt that email was often too fast. So often, it lacks social graces; people write emails while ignoring the polite niceties established in letter writing ages before it. So much about modern technology is all about distraction, and very little of it is even as polite as a conversation in person.
I've tried to correct this problem in my personal correspondence, which I suspect will one day mark me as a social dinosaur.
The question is, then: is Facebook's solution good design? Or is it an indicator of what's happening to society as a whole? I tend to lean towards the latter. To me, it looks cluttered, unpleasant, and noisy; impossible to keep more than a single topic moving at a time. It can't do what email can do already, and it lacks elegance, simplicity, or much in the way of aesthetic appeal.
Perhaps it will be useful for some. Perhaps it will meet the needs of the group it was designed for, but it's obviously not meant for people like me.
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