Facebook Messages: In the war room

Facebook launched its new messaging system yesterday on the rooftop of a swanky San Francisco hotel. As co-founder Mark Zuckerberg waxed lyrical about the new service which blends online chat, text messages and other real-time conversation tools with traditional e-mail, a roomful of engineers were holed up in a conference room around the corner coding like there was no tomorrow.

 

The "war room" of around 30 Facebookers was led by Joel Seligstein, the engineering manager in charge of the product.

The BBC was among the few journalists given access to the area as the coders huddled over their computers turning on the new product.

"Every time we turn on a new set of users we have to move their data from the old system to the new system - so one by one we have to run that process. Right now we are moving the first set of users over," explained Mr Seligstein.

"This is the first time we are getting to see some real production traffic and real users doing different things."

While Mr Seligstein said he couldn't be precise about numbers, he told the BBC that the coterie of engineers was moving over "tens of thousands today just to get a good base run and will roll out from there depending how well it does."

This is the company's biggest project to date; while there was a core team of around 15 engineers working on the product for over a year, Mr Seligstein said when they first started they didn't grasp the enormity of the task:

"It started out pretty small before we really understood the scope of what we were trying to do. It turned out to be a much bigger task than we thought, especially after we decided to go with our own custom infrastructure. It was a big technical adventure.

"We wanted to really convince our users that we were launching a scalable infrastructure and that we were going to do really well here. So we spent a lot of extra time than we normally do testing our software. I think it was a bigger endeavour than we thought but I feel good about what we got."

E-mail arguably remains the killer app when it comes to how the majority of people communicate.

In the main room, Mr Zuckerberg told reporters and analysts that he had spoken to high school pupils who told him they found e-mail slow and cumbersome. To his delight, he said, they used Facebook to send messages and stay in touch.

Before the launch, there was much speculation over whether Facebook Messages presented an e-mail killer. Mr Stelistein said that when his team started work on the product, code-named Project Titan, that was the furthest thing from their minds:

"I don't think we used that term internally even once. It was all about getting those conversations to happen in one place; targeting e-mail was never our intention.
 
"We never really set out to reinvent anything. We always talked about this as an evolution and not a revolution and a lot of the things we did came out of us playing with the product and saying: ' This is what we want. We wish it did this and someone would build it.'
 
"We knew we wanted to combine these channels (IM, online chat, e-mail and texts). From day one, we asked: 'How do we get this context that we are missing? How do I stop checking my e-mail everyday from those people I want to contact?' We knew we wanted to get those people conversations in because they were important and I want to check them in one place.
 
"We were also frustrated about how SMS works. And we were fascinated by how the iPhone works. How those things funnel into Facebook. We wanted to do the same things for people without iPhones as well. We really wanted to pull those communication channels together and the rest kind of fell into place.
 
"I think it's about making communication shorter and simpler."

In an effort to be less formal than e-mail, Facebook Messages don't have subject lines, cc and bcc fields and don't expect you to type "Dear Rory" or "Thanks from Maggie".

One industry watcher told the BBC that she predicted a learning curve for users; Mr Seligstein did not disagree:

"When giving it to our test users and employees, it takes sometimes up to a week or two before they really get it. The first day they say 'not much is different apart from I have an e-mail address now'.
 
"Two weeks later they have an experience they really like. They are having a conversation and they leave their computer and they continue it on the phone or they come back and it magically pops up in chat. Most of the time they won't really notice."

He added that he thought younger users would get used to it first:

"I think we will have a little bit of an adoption problem - not a problem, but it will take a little longer for the rest to hop on board. We've noticed that even for us, it takes a week or two before you really grab on and get this system. I think they'll slowly come on board but I think the younger guys will grab it really quickly."

In the longer term, Mr Seligstein hopes the product will change the way people communicate:

"The next generation of messaging online will be shorter, faster communication. I also think we will see a convergence.

"The next question is: how do we integrate this into other products? What does this mean for groups? How do you talk to your groups and plan events? How do we pull them together? Where else are communications happening, especially on Facebook? And what model really works best for them?"

The war room continues to port a trove of data; slowly but surely over the coming months, Facebook says, every one of its 500-million-plus users will be offered an @facebook.com address.

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