As you may have heard, Facebook is making a significant change to the way messaging works on its mobile app. Specifically the company is removing the messaging functions from the primary Facebook Mobile app and has begun shunting its users into the separate Facebook Messenger app for chat.
And this is the crazy part: it requires an entirely separate download.
We all know how onerous it is to download apps these days. It can take tens of seconds for a new app to install, just so you can hate-play Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.
The Internet's response was, of course, measured and nuanced.
Ah ha ha ha. Sorry, that one gets me every time. The Internet's response was the exact opposite of measured and nuanced. In fact, to look at its reaction, you'd think the company had mounted an armed invasion of Kansas while simultaneously running over everyone's grandmother and strangling a paralyzed puppy.
Now, I'm always glad to see people getting energized over something truly important (after we tackle this problem we're going to get right on climate change and world hunger, right?). But I'd also like to offer a few words as counterpoint to the prevailing view.
Those few words are these: I freaking love Facebook Messenger.
Driven to distraction
Why do I love an app that most people seem so deeply persecuted by? Because it allows me to use Facebook's messaging system the way I'd most like to. Which is to say, without using Facebook.
Now let's get one thing straight up front. I am a happy and willing participant in Facebook and its trademark shallow, scattershot virtual interactions that have permanently devalued both liking something and being someone's friend. Though we may not actually talk to one another any more, over the past few years my "friends" have become extremely good at crafting droll commentary about what they're doing, how they feel about current events and which puppy videos are the very, very best puppy videos. And I find all of this very entertaining.
So I don't hate Facebook. But I do know I can't be trusted with it.
Facebook is the most scientifically advanced form of distraction mankind has yet created. Its intoxicating stew of self-absorption/congratulation/loathing results in an endless series of click-holes, available any hour of the night or day, with a reliable percentage of new things I can watch, read, shake a fist at, or comment on. It is the endless regress, the garden of earthly delights, the ultimate entertainment, the abyss from which no man returns (at least not without an inspiring story about an Ivory Coast cacao farmer that puts EVERYTHING into perspective).
Thus, much like drinking, catfishing and trolling the comments sections on Diary of a Quilter, Facebook is strictly an after-hours activity for me. As someone who works at a computer all day, if I start allowing Facebook into my daytime routine, I'm toast.
Still, though, I need to communicate with people. And for better or worse, a lot of those people are on Facebook. Facebook remains one of the most reliable ways to get in touch with anyone you've ever friended, despite any changes to that person's job/phone number/last name/country of residence/stated racial affiliation. In addition to being a global timesuck and a cause of depression, Facebook is also a messaging service that almost everyone I know is signed up with, most of whom still use it at least occasionally.
The right tool for the job
Unfortunately, though, when I get a message through Facebook, I have to run its hazardous distraction gauntlet to view it, meaning there is a high-to-100% chance I will get abducted by at least one thing in my feed, which will send me down one of those aforementioned click-holes, thereby blowing large holes in my productivity.
And Facebook Messenger solves this problem. When I get Facebook messages, it allows me to see and respond to only those messages. No weight loss come-ons, no parents getting hit in the crotch by overexcited 2 year-olds, no you'll-never-guess-what-happens-next.
That's why I like it. But I was using Messenger before this whole mess started. What about this business of Facebook forcing its users to use a separate app for messages?
I think that makes a lot of sense too. It comes down to good app design and the ways that apps fundamentally differ from programs that run on PCs. In the past, PC software (or services that run in the browser) have typically added disparate features over time, which is something the more flexible PC interface can handle more deftly. Apps, on the other hand, are typically purpose-built tools that (when made correctly) help us accomplish a single function better than we could in a multifunction tool.
Real-time and asynchronous: different beasts
Facebook's original stock in trade was asynchronous communication. You're interacting with your friends, but not in real time. This asynchronous nature is why it's so much more useful for entertainment than Twitter (which is better for keeping up on what's happening in real time). Facebook presents the posts its algorithm determines are most relevant to you from the past several days of your friends' activities. Conversations on a single topic are public, can last days, and are conveniently filed into their own buckets instead of jammed into the rest of your Twitter feed.
Messenger's functions are more about synchronous communications, as in real-time, all-in-a-long-stream chat. That chat can be done via text, emoji, sound files or Skype-like voice-over-IP. And if we want those communications to be as streamlined and easy-to-accomplish as possible, it makes sense to have a specially optimized app. In addition, these communications are also typically private or limited to just a few people for a given conversation. It makes psychological sense to separate them from our public Facebook lives.
And it makes no sense at all to have all of these real-time and private chat features bogging down the original Facebook app, which should optimized for browsing feeds, consuming content and engaging in asynchronous communication.
Different jobs require different tools and Facebook seems to understand this. Messenger is where you talk to your friends. Facebook is where you talk to your "friends." If all goes well, I hope to see Facebook bring more innovation and functionality to both these apps, each of which will hopefully enhance the specific experiences they have been built for.
Splitting these apps may provoke some short term pain (you're not getting the 23 seconds it takes to download Messenger back, you know), but it's a long term win for Facebook's users. As a side-bonus, you'll get to experience the joy of communicating with your friends without your newsfeed putting a bag over your head and shoving you roughly down a click-hole every time you say hi.
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