More than a third of a billion people are active users of Facebook Messages, which made major strides to becoming a fully fledged email service on Monday.
I am among the first batch of users to get an @facebook.com address in a rollout expected to take many months. First impressions on the new features after the jump:
Mark Zuckerberg was at pains to point out at his Monday press conference that this is not Facebook doing email, rather Facebook’s Messages upgrade adding email as a component to a conversational approach to messaging, where email, SMS texts and instant-messaging chats are blended together.
The experience starts with an invitation as you log on to “Upgrade to the New Messages” – “Text, chat and email together in one simple conversation.”
The benefits of upgrading are explained – all of your types of conversation are in one stream, your social inbox will filter messages down to the people you care about the most and conversations can be kept forever.
This, of course, is an inside Facebook experience. There is no straightforward way of importing email from other accounts – although this is being worked on – and my Skype and other IM chats outside Facebook are not catered for.
However, I am given the option of receiving outside emails and replying to them if I claim my @facebook.com address. This I did and tried sending myself an email from Gmail. It landed in my Messages conversation list within a minute and my test response landed back in Gmail a minute later.
The email went straight into my main Messages folder as the new service recognised me as, naturally, closely related to myself. I next sent an email with an Excel spreadsheet attachment, which could be downloaded from Facebook or viewed at Office.com, under an arrangement announced today with Microsoft.
My main Messages folder is already full of messages from close friends, while the Other Messages one has mass-email invites and newsletters of lesser interest. I can fine-tune this in my Privacy settings. The emails to myself were appended to a conversation, which grows longer over time and will be searchable.
However, I worry about how Facebook will cope with the flood of spam that is now heading for people with easily guessable email addresses on Facebook.
Facebook’s founder was critical on Monday of the media hype that had built up about Messages becoming a Gmail killer.
It’s clearly not that. Most of my emails are business-related and I can’t imagine using Facebook for them – Outlook, Gmail and other services do a much better job.
However, for friends, I could set up filters in Gmail to automatically forward all their emails to my address at Facebook Messages and handle my social and personal life there.
That does have its attractions and with social connections encouraging personal recommendations, revealing buying intentions and making advertising more effective, ad-dependent Google and other webmail providers should be concerned at Facebook’s latest move.
