For quite some time now, the buzz among Facebook employees about a supposed GMail Killer has been evident. A lot of discussions followed on tech blogs and forums. The project was supposedly codenamed as Project Titan, and was touted to be an e-mail solution which would offer a new way of communication to Facebook users, thus encouraging them to ditch their GMail (and other) email accounts. The hype increased when Facebook announced that it would be conducting a private meeting to announce something special. The announcement was made, and it wasn’t exactly a killer. In fact, it wasn’t anything remotely exciting. It was a revamped version of Facebook Messages.
Facebook made it clear that this isn’t exactly an e-mail solution, although users will be getting an optional ‘@facebook.com’ address. This is just a revamped system which bring together all text, chat, e-mail and PM conversations between friends on Facebook. Users may choose any form of communication to reach their friends, and all of it will be recorded instantaneously under Facebook Messages. This is the basic theory behind this new system. However, Facebook seems to have spent less time in testing, because this new system has given rise to a bug which was previously absent from Facebook. This bug is making life hard on Facebook for people who decided to test the new messaging system.
It is well-known that users have to manually request for an invitation to start using Facebook messages. The people who started using this system have reported that many accounts are bring frozen due to a bug which tests the accounts for authenticity, and freezes them, demanding a photo ID from users. This is simply ridiculous because Faebook never asked for a photo ID from its users before, and one usually doesn’t require any ID to register. This is all the handiwork of this new bug, which demands that the photo ID provide complete information of the user, so that their account can be verified and then unfrozen.
Needless to say, news about this bug has caused outrage among users who have had their accounts frozen for no fault of theirs. Some people have reportedly uploaded their photo IDs but are still awaiting the release of their account. Some users are seeing this as an ugly attempt from Facebook’s side to gather more private information about its users. This has led to the questioning about the reliability of the messaging system.
From its side, Facebook has promised to look into this problem and eliminate the bug as soon as possible. So users who have had their accounts frozen are advised not to upload their photo IDs, and wait for Facebook to take action and unfreeze the accounts. Meanwhile, the number of people who are requesting invites for the new messaging system is still going up, as they are obliviously unaware of this bug. It would be better to wait for a while and see how the messaging system plays out, and after such bugs are ironed out, then it would be safe to sign up to the new system.