Facebook Messaging just got better...
there are some friends you can send a Facebook message, and others you have to email. Not anymore.
Context & Ripple Effects
The change lands mid-way through an unusually busy August 2007 for Facebook: within a week the company had leaked its index-page [[a:none|source code]] on the 'Facebook Secrets' blog, shipped an iPhone-tuned site at iphone.facebook.com that outside reviewers called the best of its kind, opened notifications to the wider web via new RSS feeds including Friends Status Updates, and put Haiping Zhao's Data Store API into closed beta on the developer wiki. Unifying messages and email is the consumer-facing piece of the same move — a walled garden being cracked open one surface at a time.
The story traveled: TechCrunch ran it under a headline complaining Facebook 'opens email up a little; I want more,' and CNET covered it the same day. Both outlets treated a modest inbox fix as a signal about where Facebook intends to go with communications — which is why a small product note warranted national tech coverage.
First-order effects
- Facebook users composing a message can now reach friends who have no Facebook account, ending the split workflow of checking whether each contact lives inside the network or only in an address book.
Second-order effects
- TechCrunch's 'I want more' reaction frames the competitive stakes: if Facebook pushes from one-off outbound messages toward full two-way interop, it starts competing with webmail providers for everyday personal correspondence rather than sitting alongside them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — feeds opening notifications outward in mid-August 2007, messaging reaching non-members now — the structural direction is a social network absorbing email's role for casual contact, with Facebook as the default identity layer people message through rather than around.
The trend: Personal messaging is migrating from standalone email clients into social platforms, with Facebook selectively lowering its walls feed by feed and inbox by inbox.