I hear many people predict the demise of email for personal communications in favor of social networking. They say that Facebook makes it hard to get Inbox messages that aren't from real people, so there is much less spam. While this may be true in the short term, I think in the long term messaging within Facebook and social network will have the same fate as email and will become more and more like email over time.

I've already talked about how Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn today are very similar to AOL, Compuserv and Prodigy of 20 years ago - separate networks that are destined to be joined together with SMTP. Do you really want to have a bunch of different social network Inboxes to check? Do you think people who are messaging you will be able to figure out whether they should send a message to on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or regular old email? It's just going to get more and more confusing.

In addition to that, I've already seen many businesses setting up Facebook profiles as if they were people instead of using Pages the way they are supposed to. They do this so that they can send commercial messages to the users Inbox instead of sending Updates which show up in a less prominent spot. They know that more people will read their message if its grouped with the other personal messages instead of the other commercial messages. However, its poisoning the well - the act of putting the commercial messages in the Inbox reduces its value and as others start to do that it will become ineffective for everyone.

For example, here is a Facebook profile for a coffee shop in Austin that keeps showing up on my "People you may know" list. And here is a music venue. I'm sure its a nice coffee shop. Considering that they both have almost 500 friends, the strategy seems to be working. I've seen many other businesses do the same thing.

Yesterday I received my first trojan horse virus in my Facebook Inbox. It looked like it was coming from a friend of mine and linked to a YouTube video I should watch. But the link was funny looking and it was a friend I hadn't talked to in a while, so I was immediately suspicious. I bet that a lot of Facebook users won't be suspicious and will click on it.

Could this be the end of the innocence for Facebook?

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The Washington Post just ran an article about this issue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/25/AR2008082502407.html?wpisrc=newsletter