Facebook messaging is a lot like email and an online forum\u00c2\u00a0rolled into one interface. \u00c2\u00a0You can send your friends a message and they will all see it and each others replies to it – but what happens when you get added to a message you don’t want to be a part of?<\/p>\n
I recently was part of a message thread with family when one of our family members used foul\u00c2\u00a0language in his reply – which went to everyone in the thread. \u00c2\u00a0Some of the more conservative members of the family were offended and hit the reply all button to say so… As you can imagine – the messages started flying back and forth about not being so easily offended and not being so offensive. \u00c2\u00a0Most of us just wanted to ‘opt out’ of the thread (even the person that started it).<\/p>\n
Hitting the delete button removes it from your inbox – but a few minutes later and there is a new reply to the thread and its like you never clicked delete. \u00c2\u00a0You may think this is an issue that Facebook should solve (and you may be right) but its not as simple as you might think. \u00c2\u00a0Sending a message in facebook isn’t ‘like’ email – it is email. \u00c2\u00a0You can’t connect to your mail box with Outlook or Apple Mail – but its a simple mailbox just the same.<\/p>\n
What does that mean, you might ask? \u00c2\u00a0Lets walk through it as an email – when you send an email to a bunch of people – they all get a copy in their inbox. \u00c2\u00a0You know that if you then delete your copy – their copy doesn’t get deleted, just your copy. \u00c2\u00a0If they hit reply to all – everyones name in the\u00c2\u00a0original message will get their reply – including you. \u00c2\u00a0You can’t ‘opt-out’ from your friends and family sending you email (and you likely don’t want to).<\/p>\n
Now – back to a Facebook message – the same technical processes happen as when you send an email – only the user interface (Facebook’s website) shows your inbox to you in a manner that looks like an online forum. \u00c2\u00a0We call them ‘threads’ when in reality, its an email chain. \u00c2\u00a0The one big difference from Facebook and your email inbox – with your email program (gmail, outlook, hotmail, etc) you have the ability to remove people from an email before you hit send.<\/p>\n
In Facebook – you can reply to a single person or to all – nothing in between. \u00c2\u00a0Which is the one thing facebook could fix easily – but then it becomes difficult to know if someones name was removed from a message and are no longer getting replies to all (this is the same with email). \u00c2\u00a0For example – you send an email to 10 people. When anyone hits reply to all, all 10 people get the email. \u00c2\u00a0But your friend Bob doesn’t like your friend Bill – so Bob removes Bill from his reply to all. \u00c2\u00a0Now only 9 people get Bob’s reply. \u00c2\u00a0When any of those nine people hit reply to all – Bill won’t get a copy because he isn’t in Bob’s message. \u00c2\u00a0Without looking at who is in the “to” field every time you send a message – you wouldn’t know when this occurred. \u00c2\u00a0I suspect this may be why facebook’s approach is to make their version of email more “user friendly”. \u00c2\u00a0In my\u00c2\u00a0experience, “user friendly” equals less functionality. \u00c2\u00a0Removing options makes it simple to use – but with less options!<\/p>\n
I think I may have lost most of you by now – but I hope this has helped…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Facebook messaging is a lot like email and an online forum\u00c2\u00a0rolled into one interface. \u00c2\u00a0You can send your friends a message and they will all see it and each others replies to it – but what happens when you get added to a message you don’t want to be a part of? I recently was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1860"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2727,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1860\/revisions\/2727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sackrider.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}