Facebook's 'other' inbox keeps 'missing' messages

By Paterno Esmaquel II, GMA News

Published December 14, 2011 4:41pm

Do you think you’re “missing” some Facebook messages?

Most respondents in an ongoing poll by tech site Mashable also do – with some of them frustrated over missing messages that would have alerted them about lost-and-found items, or would have reconnected them with long lost family members and friends.

It turns out, however, that the “missing” messages are not missing after all, said a recent online report from Slate magazine.

In her Slate article titled “Furious at Facebook again,” author Elizabeth Weingarten began by recounting her experience of leaving her month-old MacBook Air in a New York City taxi.

“I tracked down the cab driver; he claimed he never found it. A week later, I reluctantly purchased a new laptop. And that was that,” she wrote in her article last Dec. 9.

“Until today,” she added, “when a colleague at Slate sent an email around about the messages Facebook hides in an obscure folder labeled ‘Other.’ Haven’t heard of it? Click the Messages tab on the left side of your Facebook screen. ‘Other’ will then appear beneath it. Click on ‘Other’ and you will unearth months of messages you probably missed.”

“When I did just this, I inhaled sharply: A man had sent me four very important messages: two on Nov. 16, one on the 17th, and another on the 18th,” Weingarten wrote.

To her relief, the stranger said he had her laptop – a fact that Facebook initially “hid” from her.

“How could Facebook do this? Why would they do this?” the author said.

Social inbox

In a statement on Facebook’s blog, the social networking site explained that the segregation of messages into the “Other” folder is part of its “Social Inbox” feature.

“It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement,” Facebook said in a blog post last February.

“It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately,” Facebook said.

In a follow-up story on the Facebook Social Inbox last Monday, Slate reported an “outpouring of responses from readers who reported lost messages from friends, employers, and – just as in Elizabeth’s case – good Samaritans looking to return lost possessions.”

“Were you upset to find your hidden messages?” asked the tech site Mashable in an ongoing poll that echoed the Slate readers’ frustrations. Most respondents or 36.3 percent answered, “Yes! There were a lot of messages I wish I had seen.”

GMA News Online is still trying to reach Facebook for comment about this recent wave of user feedback.

‘Disconnecting’ people?

The segregation of Facebook messages based on one’s social network points to a deeper problem that Eli Pariser, member of the progressive group MoveOn, has warned about.

In a video for TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, Pariser cautioned Internet users about algorithmic gatekeepers of information that have replaced human gatekeepers like newspaper editors.

Pariser said that by filtering information based on one’s social networks, Facebook isolates its users from the rest of the world.

“When I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something really different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that will connect us all together, and I was sure that it was gonna be great for democracy and for our society,” he said.

“But there’s some kind of shift,” Pariser added, “in how information is flowing online. And it’s invisible. And if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be a real problem.”

He said this shift is evident not only in Facebook, but also in search engines like Google and even news websites.

“This moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see,” Pariser said in describing what he called a “filter bubble.”

“If algorithms are gonna curate the world for us, if they’re gonna decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just key to relevant. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable, or challenging, or important,” Pariser said.

He also urged officials from Facebook and Google, as well as other websites, to encode in their filtering algorithms “a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility”; to make the filters transparent for users; and to give the users “some control.”

“We really need the Internet,” Pariser added, “to connect us all together… to introduce us to new ideas, and new people, and different perspectives. And it’s not gonna do that if it leaves us isolated in a Web of one.” — TJD, GMA News

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