Yesterday, Facebook announced their own "modern messaging system" that combines email, text messaging, and instant messages into a single stream that founder Mark Zuckerberg says goes well "beyond email".  The new service, which will debut Monday with an iPhone app and roll out over the next few months, mimics the behavior of teens who are already abandoning conventional email to converse across multiple platforms in short bursts. But Facebook Messaging could also make social music marketing more difficult. Here’s why:

Messages May Be Filtered Out – While a Facebook.com email address is offered, it’s not required. Whatever the source of email, Facebook promises to use "Friends", "Likes" and other clues to filter email. So a fan who signed up for a band’s email updates, could find their emails automatically shuttled into an "other" folder if they have not also friended the artist on Facebook.

Facebook says that their system will get smarter over time, so that people that aren’t friends on Facebook but communicate often will show up in the stream. How repeated one way communications like email newsletters will be filtered or allowed to pass into the users main stream is unclear

Too Much Of The Same – A major selling point of the Facebook’s system is that it unifies email, SMS, IM and Facebook messaging into a single stream somewhat like Google’s failed Wave.  But that means that artist and marketers who automatically post the same updates to multiple channels risk overloading users of Facebook Messaging.

Is There A Solution? – It’s important not to judge a system that no one has used, and its likely that some of Facebook’s new features will actually enhance the artist/fan relationship.  But a first look at Facebook Messages should encourage artists and music marketers to step up their friending efforts now to avoid flitering later and to closely monitor future developments.

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Mashable’s Pete Cashmore tells us:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now, sharing with everybody would be the starting point, rather than with a small group of friends. Is this more about reflecting social norms or changing them to help Facebook compete with Twitter?

The statement, made during a livestream of the Crunchies awards, hits on a hot button issue for Facebook: it recently notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification. While the message claimed that Facebook was displaying the message to give users more privacy controls, blindly clicking “next” was a way to make much of your data public. And in fact, some data like the Friends List has become more public without any settings changes by users.

I honestly don’t know where I stand on all of this. I think my only real concern is just how little attention most people pay to these major shifts in social norms especially when they are moved along at rocket speed by something as pervasive and powerful as Facebook. I know that even with the new “everyone needs to see everyone else’s stuff” privacy policy at Facebook, I can go in and lock down my public profile to whatever degree I want. How many of the 350 million supposed users of the service actually know that or even care? I don’t know. I suspect not as many as should.

An interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal today from Jaron Lanier, which is an excerpt from his new book. He is a pioneer in virtual reality technology and has some very real concerns about this new move to the “social collective” and I don’t disagree with him on much of it. Here’s a sample:

Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

I realize that I am mixing and matching the personal web and the business of the web. They are, however, intricately intertwined especially as we move into the future. When the generation of “open information and free stuff etc, etc” are in the business world (and a lot are already) this new “social norm” that Zuckerberg talks about so casually could very well mean the end to true innovation unless signed off by the collective. As a result that means watered down ideas in most cases. As if it’s not bad enough, the US government is showing socialist tendencies. What if the business world became that way too? Geesh, time to buy some land, make my own clothes and grow my own food. We will all be brought to the middle and the world could be very average.

Of course these are just my own opinions on this but I am really no that interested in having to depend on everyone “signing off” on one my ideas before it can move forward. I am not thrilled about the idea of things like “search neutrality” that reared its ridiculous head in the recent weeks. I like privacy. I like some semblance of control. Maybe it is time to consider that plot of land and a tractor. That is of course, if it’s OK with everyone.

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Bloomberg.com reports that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t too concerned about how people are struggling. He’s just happy he’s on the right end of this economy

Facebook Inc. plans to expand its staff by as much as 50 percent this year as it benefits from a surplus of engineers amid the recession, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said.

“No one else has been hiring,” Zuckerberg, 25, said in an interview. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

While it’s pretty easy to see the business upside for Facebook since so many talented people are being let go during this excuse for cutting staff recession there is likely to be a better way to say it. Can’t you feel the compassion for the down-trodden? Well, considering the source, forget I even mentioned that.

Zuckerberg’s pitch internally is that the Facebook crowd must keep the lean and mean look in order to keep costs under control and to hit the lofty revenue numbers ($500 million this year) that have been set.

“The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” Zuckerberg said in the Aug. 20 interview. “A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you’ve made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage.”

Gotta love the HP feel to his approach. Facebook is certainly one of the ones looking better than most during this current day and age. Keeping everything on the cheap makes for good press for sure. One wonders, though, if there going to be the revenue projected for the company and where will it come from as the advertising strength of social networks is still a largely untested area. As it always is, this will be interesting to follow as everyone feels their way through new models and markets with literally no history to look back to for guidance.

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Based on a post for the General Counsel for Facebook

As I read the post my greatest question was did they actually get 30% of their active users to vote so the following statement in a post from Facebook’s Grand High Poobah, Mark Zuckerberg, would play out

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

There was a ton of speculation around what that number actually was. Based on Ullyot’s post announcing the results (this seems so silly in light of covering important votes like political elections, doesn’t it?) there are a few questions raised. Ullyot states

The more than 600,000 users who voted constitute a significant number of people, but at the same time that’s a small number compared to our user base of more than 200 million. We made significant efforts to make voting easy and to give everyone the opportunity to vote — including by translating the documents and voting application into several of the most popular languages on the site, showing a message about the vote on users’ home pages, and running advertisements and videos across Facebook promoting the vote.

Ok, 600,000 voters. If this were to be binding then that means there are only 2 million active users. Even if only 50% of the total Facebook user number that is popular to quote now (200 million) are active then 30 million votes would be needed for a binding result. Either way this is some bad math for Facebook.
So what’s the real deal here? Facebook is saying that

the preliminary numbers indicate that approximately 74.4 percent of users who voted chose the proposed documents – the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – over the existing Terms of Use

74% of 600,000 remember. So unless Facebook fesses up to much lower usage numbers or they choose to ignore the 30% rule this vote is strictly a PR move. They can actually still do whatever they want because their requirement of 30% of the total users being involved in the vote for the results to be binding probably was not met. If it was met then advertisers are going to be very interested in that ‘unspoken result’ that says ‘well, looks like we only have 2 million actual users in the last 30 days’.

Ullyot’s post says further

We’d hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.

Also, in an attempt to look like this vote is ‘rubber stamped’ by the loudest proponents of change the Facebook post gives links to the 4 biggest people involved in the ‘movment’. Looks good unless you actually click on the links and see that they are all dated prior to the results being reported.

So basically this ‘result’ is in question still. Advertisers will be very interested in how many people are actually using Facebook vs. those who just have an account. Also, all of this reaching out to the people stuff could really be just a big PR play with little substance. Or, if there is an actual statement buried somewhere that says this is or is not a binding result, either there are only 2 million active users in the last 30 days of Facebook or people don’t care nearly as much as we think. Either way the folks over at Twitter must be snickering because once again Facebook’s attempts to be transparent leave the waters more muddied than ever.

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What will also be historic to watch is how twenty-something cub Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg handles what appears to be economic Armageddon (as Jim Cramer prognosticated a year ago in his famous meltdown—the same guy telling you take your money out of the market now). Even more historic and interesting will be to compare how Zuckerberg handles it to how GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner does.

Early developments are pretty telling. Wagoner has taken his case to YouTube. In a two minute video, he spoke of innovation and new, more economically friendly cars down the pipe. He talked about gas prices and fuel economy and asked the YouTube audience for thoughtful commentary.

After 8,000 or so views there has been no commentary, but that’s beside the point. Wagoner’s video is kinda Iacocca-ish, which is probably what he was going for.

What sort of guidance can we expect from his quarter-life dotcom hotshot counterpoint? You might call it a cautious approach. Zuckerberg is set on nailing down a business model within the next three years.

Maybe that’s when his student loans come due?

In an interview for a German news site, Zuckerberg explains revenue for Facebook isn’t as important as growth at the moment:

“I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I’m pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today.”

Maybe Microsoft would like to take that quarter-billion it plunked down and put it toward buying up a failing bank. That seems to be a pretty popular move right now.

It’s still hard to believe Zuckerberg once blew off billion-dollar negotiations with Yahoo—pre-Microsoft bid and pre-tanking-stock Yahoo. Honestly, offer me a billion dollars for something. Anything. I’ll take it.