Facebook announces they will provide all 500 million users with email addresses. I'm not surprised!
In my post from October 22 "Will social networks like Facebook mean the end for email?" I mentioned a "thing to watch…" will be whether Facebook will start providing email addresses. Well it looks to have just happened.
As in my previous post, Facebook providing email addresses will mean an increasing shift away from traditional email programs. However the rate of shift will depend on several things which are related to how sophisticated Facebook's email system will be compared to encumbants like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.
According to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's email service "is not an email killer." Zuckerberg says "this is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it," and "this is the way that the future should work." However I feel this is probably just Facebook's way of justifying their lack of capabilities compared to traditional email provides. They're claiming to be transforming the way email works for people, but that's probably a bit bold.
There are a few things which Facebook will need to address before it can challenge traditional email. This includes:
- Ability to send and receive attachments.
- Ability to create rich text messages with formatting. This includes the ability to embed images. However it's likely Facebook will only allow embedding of images inside Facebook accounts.
- Ability to provide anti-spam capability. This is often the main feature that separates the best email providers from the worst.
- Ability to download your messages outside the Facebook network. Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail support downloading email externally to other email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, or to mobile devices like iPhone.
In addition to these core email features, Facebook will also need to carefully manage security and privacy, which is has historically failed to manage effectively. It might be a while before users are willing to have statements from banks, telephone companies, etc. emailed into their Facebook accounts.
We'll have to wait and see what happens. In the short term, Facebook will not mean the end for email, however there are likely to be millions of users cancelling their existing email accounts in favour of the convenience of having one messaging platform.
