Text-based conversations are not in-person conversations! Text-based communication has existed for centuries prior to Facebook, and existing social protocols are perfectly capable of handling "seen" notifications. "Sorry, I didn't get your message" and other half-truths are an essential part of human interaction. If you want to know if your friends received a text message, just ask them. Instantaneous "X saw your message" notifications are an intolerable intrusion into private behavior, as they can convey unintended meaning without verifying user intent, especially in multi-party conversations.
Aside from the mangling of social behavior, "seen" is an impossible flag to get right. Maybe someone else was using the PC, maybe the person shut their PC down without looking at their browser window, even though the browser window was focused, etc.
>Text-based conversations are not in-person conversations!
My guess is Facebook is wants its messaging system to be farther towards in-person conversation on the scale of information-richness.
>"seen" is an impossible flag to get right
I'll agree with you there, but I think most cases would be handled quite well by setting "seen" iff the user interacts with the Facebook window after the message is displayed. This would handle situations where the browser is in focus but the computer is unoccupied, switching users, shutting down, etc.
Comments
Text-based conversations are not in-person conversations! Text-based communication has existed for centuries prior to Facebook, and existing social protocols are perfectly capable of handling "seen" notifications. "Sorry, I didn't get your message" and other half-truths are an essential part of human interaction. If you want to know if your friends received a text message, just ask them. Instantaneous "X saw your message" notifications are an intolerable intrusion into private behavior, as they can convey unintended meaning without verifying user intent, especially in multi-party conversations.
Aside from the mangling of social behavior, "seen" is an impossible flag to get right. Maybe someone else was using the PC, maybe the person shut their PC down without looking at their browser window, even though the browser window was focused, etc.
>Text-based conversations are not in-person conversations!
My guess is Facebook is wants its messaging system to be farther towards in-person conversation on the scale of information-richness.
>"seen" is an impossible flag to get right
I'll agree with you there, but I think most cases would be handled quite well by setting "seen" iff the user interacts with the Facebook window after the message is displayed. This would handle situations where the browser is in focus but the computer is unoccupied, switching users, shutting down, etc.