Facebook’s Email could really Take Down Gmail Supremacy
According to some statistics from Google, people spend 4x more times surfing the Internet than driving their car. However, when asked what a browser is, they had no clue. The first Internet users were hackers which spent most of their time on terminals, chatting through IRC, using Pine for their emails and a few newsgroup. The first Netscape Navigator was still very far.
Nowadays, the Internet is a platform and technologies like Ajax and Flash reduced (perhaps even canceled) the gap between online and local applications. Most of the people who use Internet every day, I am sure, do not know the difference between email, Outlook, Gmail or Facebook Messages. In the recent years many providers are even pushing for Web OS, with applications (e.g., Excel) and storage somewhere in the cloud.
Tech people (2% at most?) know that it is a bad idea. The rest of the world (98%) will almost not even notice the difference. After all, their spreadsheet looks the same even in a browser.
Today, I read about Facebook’s idea of launching their own email platform: it is a genius idea.
Just a few days ago Facebook reached 400 Million users, and most of them log in every day. They definitively take a look at their Walls, the homepage, and check their messages. Facebook does not have to do anything more than setting up a few SMTP/IMAP servers, tell everybody that they now have an email <username>@fbmail.com and the deal is done.
I am sure that almost everyone who managed to create and use a Gmail account is on Facebook, so why bother checking both? Just sync their address book the first time and goodbye Gmail. People do not even know what are the 8 Gb of space which Google is giving them for their emails, they do not use labels or stars, they not install addons nor use the IMAP capabilities..
For Facebook, this is a great move. They will be able to look into your email stream and figure out what your interests are to improve their targeted advertising. You will spend even more time on their site. They already managed to keep everybody logged in through the chat, and now, with the introduction of email and a better search experience (a tailored web search), people will have no reason to leave.
They are already the biggest photo sharing website of the world (Flickr who?). They are probably the biggest “forum” site of the world. Now they will also conquer email.
Good idea. Very good idea.
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I see this as a very scary thing. I love Facebook but I no longer trust it. I know for a fact that Facebook will use it’s new email service to degenerate privacy. I personally will refuse to use Facebook’s email service as anything but a secondary measure when contacting people.
If I have to, I will merely go back to just using Gmail to communicate.
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Another Day On Facebook
You created some smart points there. I did a search on the subject and found most people can agree with your blog.