The idea behind the day is to encourage people to take stock of their ballooning Facebook friend lists and to cull the marginal folks. Kimmel has been pushing the idea on his ABC show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this month, including even a theme song from country singers Brad Paisley and Darius Rucker. The idea seems to have some resonance with people, with “unfriend” turning into a trending topic on Twitter earlier on Wednesday.

In an interview Wednesday with the WSJ’s Video Network’s Simon Constable (see below), Kimmel said, “it just seemed to me that people are wasting a lot of time on Facebook talking to people or catching up with people they don’t want to catch up with.”

He said he actually has just 10 to 12 real friends. Most people on Facebook are “annoying,” he said. “No one needs to know what television show you’re watching or what you just ate, or if you’re feeling hungy, or tired or anything. … Share a little bit less, I think is the message here. For those who have Facebook, whittle it down to the people you really talk to.”

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At the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg says young people say email is too slow. They prefer Facebook or SMS.

Zuck: IM or SMS are much simpler, and people want lighter-weight things that they can use all over the place. So we need…a modern messaging system.

350 million people actively use messaging on Facebook, in part because it’s really simple. Four billion messages are sent per day. This is “private, private sharing.”

Next-generation messaging would be: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. (Those are a lot of synonyms, no?)

“This is not email. Email is one way that people will use this system, but it’s not even the primary way we think they will use it.”

Now a three-panel slide is up showing the key topics of the announcement–”seamless messaging,” “conversation history” and “social inbox.” Zuckerberg promises, “We can do some really good filtering for you to make sure you only see messages you really care about.”

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

So this is actually a relaunch of the “Messages” tool. Not email-specific. Takes all correspondence between two friends and puts them in one place.

Everyone gets an @facebook.com email address with their username. “As much as we’re providing an email address, the system’s not email,” says Boz–more like instant messaging.

Boz uses convo about dinner plans as an example, with messaging across different platforms, including IM on Facebook, email, iPhone notifications, etc. The example restaurant is Piccino in San Francisco, where, fun fact, I was for a short time the Foursquare mayor. No longer though.

Integrates with Jabber, IMAP and one more I missed. (Sorry, first time liveblogging with this tool!)

Boz shows the history of Facebook messages with his girlfriend of the last four years. But doesn’t include their instant messages and other communication. Individual messages may not be profound, but collectively they provide a narrative about someone I care about, says Boz.

Facebook rebuilt infrastructure for this project, because it’s especially important that messages don’t get lost.

Instead of Cassandra (which FB created for email search and then open sourced), the company chose something new: HBase. They also used Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper and memcache.

This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a launch–15 people, Boz says.

Users have three categories: 1) Messages: Conversations with actual people. 2) Other: Email lists and the like. And 3) Junk.

The big idea is “picking up where you left off” no matter what device or medium.

This project has been in the works for the last 15 months.

Zuck: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as a part of it. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch to Facebook.”

(Read: You silly press, we’re not competing with Gmail, we’re bigger than Gmail!)

Rolling out slowly over the next few months, starting with an invite system (ha! how Gmail!).

Oh, about IMAP: No support yet, so users can’t synch with other email systems. But Facebook wants to add later.

Interesting: Facebook messages won’t have subject lines. You just have a single messaging history with each person.

If you have been interacting with someone through email, then we’ll send replies back to email. You can indicate that you want a message to go directly to their phone. If you’re online, you get a message as an IM.

Boz: This is the end of “BRB” or “GTG.” Follows you wherever you go. (Sounds ominous when you say it like that.)

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

Zuck: For now only SMS, IM, email and FB messages–all are text. “We think this is a pretty big step by itself, and one we just wanted to take before we get started on the next set of things.”

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

Zuck: Yes, ads work the same as on the rest of Facebook, but not targeted specific to content in a message.

Zuck on Gmail competition: “They have a great product. Email is still really important to a lot of people. If we build a great product that people want to use, then people will use it.”

Question from audience: Can users go off the record like in Gmail?

Boz: Users can delete any message.

Zuck: Off the record like in IM doesn’t make sense because users may be receiving messages in a different way than you send them. If someone gets something in email instead of IM it would be unnatural to have it off the record.

Question: How will this treat communication with people who are not on Facebook?

Boz: You can communicate with whoever you want to, and will have access to all that history of the conversation.

Zuck: If you’re not a part of the FB system and outside the social graph, your emails to FB users will go into “Other” folder to start off with, rather than the main. Once the recipient says you’re an important person, you’ll go into the main folder.

Question: What about silly joke emails from your mom? Can you filter those?

Zuck: There’s only one thread with every person.

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

Zuck: “After a long discussion, the Farm Bureau has agreed to give us fb.com. And in the terms of that we have agreed not to sell farm subsidies.”

Facebook hasn’t mentioned this, but Microsoft just emailed to make sure people know they’re involved.

“As part of Facebook’s new messaging system: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/ –Microsoft is integrating the Office experience. Over the coming months, customers will be able to access and share Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as attachments to their Facebook messages. Sharing new ideas, key points of inspiration and important information just got easier–even when the need to access or share that content strikes in the middle of your latest status update.”

Question: Can you fill in the blanks of associating email addresses with Facebook friends?

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

(Uh-oh–how is this going to work when people have multiple contacts for themselves?)

Question: Storage?

“If you’re a good user, you have no concern. For people who try to find limits, they will find them.” Another ominous comment from Boz.

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The young company has really gotten way too into these show-and-tell events. The formula is down pat: The usual crowd of tech bloggers and mainstream media types, plus some partners, show up at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., office park and wait around for an awkward amount of time. Mark Zuckerberg walks up to the front of the company cafeteria and gives unscripted remarks about how great a few new products are. Product managers come demo them, questions are asked, lunch is served.

This time, at least, the Facebook product launch is in San Francisco, where the Web 2.0 Summit kicks off a little later in the day. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt goes on stage a couple hours after the Facebook event ends.)

Certainly, worse things could happen to me than having to write about a new Facebook product. But if the company wants to make such a big deal about these launches, it should come up with some really great stuff and/or bunch it all together (see: Steve Jobs).

It’s not so much the events; it’s the products themselves. Facebook’s last few launches–coming out of a self-imposed “lockdown” period of intense product development and much overtime work by employees–haven’t knocked any socks off: A gaming platform redesign, the Places check-in tool, a revised Groups feature, a way for users to download their archive of activity on the service, the Kleiner Perkins sFund launch (which Facebook got roped into hosting), single sign-on for mobile, the beginnings of a deals platform. And there were a few launches made sans event: Facebook Questions, high-resolution photos, etc.

All these are nice enough but, at best, slow-burn products. So far, none of them dramatically impact the way the majority of users value and experience Facebook.

That’s because many of them are fringe products; for instance, Pew says only 4 percent of U.S. online adults have ever shared their location with friends using a mobile device. Surely, Facebook can raise those user numbers, but location-sharing is not a mainstream activity and won’t be for a long time.

Still, even as I am bitching, I am setting Facebook up to succeed, because email is actually a mainstream product. The company will have to come through on the feature front, but there’s a good chance tomorrow’s launch could actually matter.

We can only hope.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Image courtesy Flickr user Robert Scoble.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

• Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
• Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Background: Last week, Google stopped allowing Facebook to help its users find their friends by importing their Gmail contacts list. Google said the move was about data portability and liberation, calling Facebook a “data dead end” because it wasn’t giving its users’ email addresses to Google.

Facebook yesterday found a workaround to re-enable Google contacts importing, and Facebook engineering lead Mike Vernal commented on TechCrunch at length under his own name, charging Google with hypocrisy for disallowing contact importing for Orkut last year and “limiting user choice.”

What’s funny, though, as sources have pointed out to us, is that Facebook actually does allow email importing, specifically to Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail (we checked AOL mail too, but couldn’t find it there).

This is no secret; Yahoo launched its Facebook email contact importer in March of this year. In a blog post at the time, senior product manager Rick Pal said,

Importing from Facebook is super simple…After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

Update: Microsoft confirmed through a spokesperson that its Windows Live users can import both Facebook and Gmail contacts, and said some nice stuff about its commitment to customer choice.

Access to user emails isn’t something Facebook gives just anyone. In fact, only a few partners can hook into them while the rest have to rely on users’ Facebook-formatted information available through Facebook Connect. That includes Google. The difference, according to a source, is that Yahoo and Microsoft asked nicely.

Please see my disclosure related to Facebook here.

These days, even small “business-to-business” concerns like Bill.com are experimenting with social media, perceiving the popular online hangouts as low-cost, easy-to-use venues for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. But unlike their consumer-focused counterparts–retailers that sell smartphones, jeans, games and other personal products–so-called B-to-B businesses seem to be having a harder time connecting with their target audience.

Facebook “is so consumer dominated that it takes time to find a voice that cuts through what’s already out there,” says René Lacerte, founder and chief executive of Bill.com, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

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Chris Cox, Facebook’s 28-year-old vice president of product, manages the teams of programmers and designers behind last week’s unveiling of the social network’s newest feature–the ability to sort small groups of friends–as well as other recent additions like check-ins at real-world places.

In a company filled with often reclusive programmers, Mr. Cox is an extrovert who plays in a reggae band. His top job is deepening Facebook’s role in the lives of its users while toeing the line on privacy concerns by making the site hew to real-world social norms.
A Stanford-trained software engineer who joined Facebook in 2005 after dropping out of a graduate-degree program, he takes a social approach to designing products. Humans, not computer formulas, Mr. Cox insists, can make Facebook and the Internet more useful.

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It’s called go.vn, and state-owned Vietnam Multimedia Corp. launched a trial version on revolutionary hero Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, May 19. A full version is due to go up at the end of the year. Many of its features will be familiar to anybody versed in tagging, poking and defriending: People can post photos, link to friends and ping messages back and forth online.

The catch is that users have to submit their full names and government-issued identity numbers before they can access the site. Security services monitor websites in Vietnam, whose authoritarian, one-party dictatorship treats dissidents ruthlessly.

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