Facebook revamps its messaging service and tests a paid option for message delivery
Facebook has revamped its Messages service to allow more contact between your those who have Facebook accounts and those who don’t, and for a $1 fee, those who aren’t even your friends.
Currently, if you send a Facebook message to someone you’re not connected to, it may end up in the Other tab, an oft-overlooked subsection of the inbox that basically serves as a spam folder, depending on whether you have mutual connections. With the new option, however, you would be able to pay a premium to ensure that the message ends up in the main inbox where it’s likely to be seen by the recipient.
“Today we’re starting a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance,” Facebook said in a blog post. “This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the Inbox rather than the Other folder of a recipient that they are not connected with.”
The new pay-to-message have two options for new Inbox filtering:
Basic Filtering
If you select Basic Filtering, you’ll see mostly messages from friends and people you may know (for example, friends of friends) in your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to “friends of friends” or “everyone” will have Basic Filtering on.
Strict Filtering
If you select Strict Filtering, you’ll see mostly messages from friends in your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to “friends” will have “Strict Filtering” on.
With filters, the following types of messages may reach your Inbox that before would not:
- Someone using Messenger for Android, who is not on Facebook but has your contact info in their phone, wanted to send you a message
- A friend of a friend wanted to include you in a message about a party along with some of your mutual friends
- A friend wanted to send a message to your @facebook.com address
If you see a message from someone you don’t want to hear from in your Inbox, you can always select “Move to Other” or “Report Spam” from the Actions menu. You can also block people that you don’t want to hear from on Facebook.
This is similar to the way LinkedIn does its InMail service, with one caveat. If you don’t any connections to person on LinkedIn, you have to pay for them to get a message. Anyone can send you a Facebook message for free, but if you don’t have connections, the message will most likely end up as spam in your Other folder, not your main inbox.