Facebook’s messaging system died today. First of all there were issues with sending messages with errors on sending. Then the sent folder gave an error and now all messages have vanished.
“Something’s gone wrong. We’re working to get it fixed as soon as we can.” – Facebook Messages Error Message
Many people use Facebook as their primary personal email now as so many friends are connected on Facebook. The failure of the FB message system means that many people have suddenly found that they cannot communicate with friends and family.
It is only when there are major disruptions to a service that people realise that using social networking sites to manage emails may not be the best idea after all. There are several excellent and well maintained webmail services that really relying on Facebook for messaging friends seems a bit daft on the face of it.
Instead people really should use Gmail or Yahoo! for their Internet mail. Gmail also has an excellent chat application built in, called Google Talk, that is as good as Skype and far far better than Facebook.
Facebook is a great platform for sharing news and photos with friends and family and for reconnecting with people, but Facebook’s rapid growth has resulted in extremely poor, often non-existent, customer services.
If you have a problem with Facebook, if you lose mails or cannot access your account, you will seldom be able to speak with someone their to help resolve the issue. Often people find themselves having to simply abandon their accounts and open a new one in its place.
Of course, you also need an email account to use Facebook, so really the obvious question is, once you connect with someone on Facebook why use its messaging services at all?
