Yesterday's announcement by Facebook about their new messaging service, dubbed Facebook Messages, proves one thing — that social is still about people.
Despite all the advancements in technology; the connections between services; the ability to create content on the fly; and, the how easy it is to get the info we, as consumers want, social remains to be centered around people.
Services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare, Yelp, etc. connect people with people. Yes, people are connecting because of content, but at the end of the day, it's the relationships that we forge via these channels that really matter.
The key take-a-way from yesterday's announcement by Facebook was that despite the growing size of our social rolodex, there continues to be a need to filter content and people. Some people and their respective pieces of content are more important than others. Facebook Messages will try to help users manage that headache — similar to how Priority Inbox did with Gmail.
The ironic thing out of all of this is that these innovations — Facebook Messages and Priority Inbox — are addressing issues that social created in the first place.
Social media is connecting more of us by volume. We are getting into the bad habit of collecting people and not worry about the content hurricane that it's causing.
Well, Facebook Messages is going to try and solve that problem — a problem, one could argue, the service created for all of us (though Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. could also be blamed).
It'll be interesting to see how people adopt Facebook Messages and whether or not they will use this as an opportunity to scale back that massive social rolodex. It'll also be interesting to see how Facebook Messages impacts what brands try to do via social media. Will consumers use this powerful filtering tool to weed out brand clutter and as a result, will brand-managed social campaigns falter as result?
What do you think of Facebook Messages and the growing noise that social media is creating in our lives? Also, do you think that Facebook Messages will impact how brands approach using the service as their hub of social activity?
Article first published as Facebook Messages Proves that Social Media is Still About Relationships on Technorati.