I needed to contact Amit Tiwary immediately. He wasn’t online. I called him. No answer – probably busy in a meeting or something. What to do? What to do?
Facebook Messages to the rescue.
Facebook -> Messages -> New Message.
To: Amit Tiwary
<the message>
Check the box on the lower right corner to send the message to mobile as well.
A few minutes later, I get a reply from Amit. He replied to my message, which was sent to him as an sms, and the reply was updated in the messages thread and simultaneously sms’ed to me. Work done!
What I liked about this system is that, as a person sending a message you should not fuss about the medium of delivery. It is Facebook’s responsibility to ensure that the other guy gets your message, be it chat, mail or sms. And the other person should conveniently be able to reply to the message.
This is something Gmail lacks right now. They could perhaps let a Gmail user select a subset of contacts whose mail notifications be sms’ed if the user is not online on Gtalk or if the Gmail session is not active. And this should not be something difficult to implement.
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