How Did Facebook Notes Reveal Group Messaging?

Soleio found that Facebook Notes revealed a desire to send messages to groups of people when users wrote notes and tagged others as if the tags were recipients. The team spent a couple of months building Notes, essentially blogging on Facebook, launched it, and watched the numbers for how people used it.

Messaging on Facebook allowed only one person, one recipient at a time. People were hacking a product meant for another use to express a latent desire to message groups. The pattern kicked off one to two years of his life at the company, spent putting the energy in its right place.

People self-report certain things while behavior sometimes disagrees, and the truth sits at the intersection. He does not know whether the same approach would have appeared without building, iterating, and instrumenting to hear how people used the product.