Thoughts on profile messaging

The "News" messaging interface on each person's profile, which seems to be intended to function somewhat like a Facebook wall, is kind of a pain to keep up with and track from a usability perspective. This is a result of emergent user behavior in dealing with some of the design choices and limitations on the site: 1. In order for you to receive an email notification that you have a new message, it must be made on your own profile, not someone else's. 2. Discussions on profiles are not threaded; there is no way for the system to know whether a person's comment on their own profile was directed at you or not. 3. Only "friends" can send private messages to each other; profile messages are the only medium users can use (outside of the forums) for conversations with people who aren't on their friends list. 4. But adding someone to your friends list carries with it a certain amount of potential risk, because it unavoidably gives them visibility into things you might not want random users knowing--such as your email address. The upshot of these constraints is that users are effectively funneled into commenting on profiles by default in order to communicate while preserving their privacy. But in order to carry on a back-and-forth conversation with both of you being notified when the other replies, each of you must leave messages on the other's profiles, alternating between them. If you carry on the conversation on just one profile, there's still no threading, and one person won't know when the other responds without checking frequently. And it works okay when you only have two or three people with whom you correspond. The problem comes when you have more than a few active conversations going, if you can't always keep up with the site throughout the day, or when you're trying to go back and look at a past conversation. For the latter, you end up having to keep two or more windows open--your own profile, and one for of each other person whose conversation you're trying to track. Try this sometime--pick a person with a lot of friends and a very active profile. Go back a few pages and pick someone with whom they're having a conversation. Now go to that person's profile and try to find that conversation and follow it. Now try to do that when you've got a dozen or more people you want to be talking to. The more friends you have and the less frequently you're able to check the site, the worse the problem gets. This method of using the profile messages, unfortunately, only exacerbates the noise and spam on the Recent Activity feed--you not only see any messages directed to you, you see every message left by or for every one of your friends by everyone else, whether or not that other person has anything at all to do with you. I have 40 messages on the front page of this feed; two are actually directed to me and one other involves two mutual friends--the rest are pure noise. I'm sure that redesigning the News page with threaded discussions or the like would be a major piece of work. But there are several potentially smaller changes that I think might help: 1. Filter the Recent Activity feed so that you only see messages where BOTH parties to the conversation are on your friends list. This strikes me as possibly the simplest solution from an implementation perspective, although it's certainly not a complete one. 2. Allow private messaging between non-friends, and/or allow friend requests to be sent with a short message the way you do on FB or Skype--you know, "hi, I thought your profile was interesting blah blah". Some ability to block unwanted communication would be needed, but that's needed anyway for profile comments too. 3. Lower the risk barrier of adding someone to your friends list by giving users a "Nobody" option to select in addition to "Public/Users/Friends" in terms of the visibility of their personal information. This really ought to be the default for privacy reasons, particularly with so many minors on the site.

I agree with all of this I would also like to suggest that I be notified when I receive a private message, since I don't check my inbox very often.

I actually do get notified for private messages, but I've noticed that I frequently do not get notifications that I should regardless of what they are--and I suspect it may have to do with being recently active or logged in on the site, as if the software assumes you don't need a notification if you've been on within the last <i>n</i> amount of time.