Facebook is killing email. It’s been happening slowly, and most techies disagree, but it’s been happening for a long time. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but it’s become much more relevant, with Tech Crunch reporting: “Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday“. There’s been some excellent discussion on this topic already, for example on the Hacker News discussion site. Most people there think this is a stupid/uninteresting move by Facebook. But I think this is exactly what Facebook should be doing.
Facebook has already replaced email
I recently took a trip to Spain with my family. Every time I visit an airport’s lounge, I take a glance to see what people are doing online, what kinds of sites they’re visiting. Not surprisingly, 90% of the time, people are on Facebook.
What was interesting to me was that most of the time, what I saw people doing was messaging. Sometimes chatting. It makes sense, after all – people want to tell their friends and family that they’re at the airport, about to board a plane. But that’s what was surprising – this is exactly what people use email for. Don’t they?
Why Facebook Won
The truth is, for most users, email is hard.
The top rated comment on Hacker News is:
I will be really interested to see this, because as it stands Facebook’s messaging interface is barely any better than 2001′s Hotmail (you do get a pretty picture with address autocomplete though).
Facebook’s interface may be terrible, but it’s good in the only thing that actually matters – making sure you can successfully send a message to the person you intended.
In order to email someone, you have to have their email address. If you get it wrong, you probably won’t know it. Most people’s address is a semi-random collection of words, that may or may not have anything to do with their real names. And it tends to become outdated every few years.
On the other hand, users already have all their friends and family inside Facebook. They can’t go wrong in sending the message, since they type someone’s actual name, click on a picture of that person, then send them a message – much simpler, no chance of errors.
When I want to talk to a friend, Facebook is what I turn to every time. I already live inside Facebook, and I have 300 friends there. I don’t have email addresses for most people I’m Facebook friends with, but I’ve probably messaged a good portion of them. These are messages I would never sent if I only had email available to me.
It’s funny that the fact that email is much more “open”, in a sense, makes it much harder to use than Facebook’s “closed” system, which just works. After all, this issue could have been solved with email as well, by introducing some kind of central authentication or “user profile” mechanism. The original lure of email was, in part, its anonymity, its openness. But the Internet has grown up a lot since those days when anonymity was the big deal with going online.
What Facebook is missing
The thing is, while Facebook messaging is great for talking to friends, it can’t be used for “serious” matters.
Firstly, Facebook messaging shines when talking to friends, since they usually already exist in your friends list. Talking business with someone you just met at a conference, with whom you have no mutual friends, is still not perfect.
More importantly, Facebook isn’t seen as a serious platform. This is less true now than it used to be, but I would still hesitate to ask people to Facebook me in order to talk business – Facebook is for friends and family, email is for work.
What Facebook should do next
What Facebook should do next is work as hard as they can to make Facebook the only destination for messaging. They already conquered the “talk to friends” portion, now all they need is to integrate the more “serious” side into it, and they’ll have taken control over every way people talk online.
In fact, that’s exactly my guess as to what Project Titan is about. Facebook wants to give you an email client, which will give you the same interface for messaging friends on Facebook, and for talking to more “serious” people (non-friends) via email.
If they manage to do it right, this will be a huge deal for most users. Facebook messaging made talking to your friends work. If they can get the same ease-of-use into talking to anyone, users will flock to this new service. It won’t happen overnight, of course, but it will be the next step in Facebook’s long-term game to effectively take over everything people do online.
Is this a good thing?
I wrote this piece from the point of view of Facebook – what Facebook should be doing to become even bigger and more powerful, which is clearly in their interest. But for us web citizens, is this a good thing?
Hard to say. I love Facebook – it’s made keeping in touch with people in my life much easier, and I love that I can talk to anyone I want with a minimum of fuss. I’d love to get those same advantages when talking to people outside of my social circle.
But I am hesitant to give Facebook so much power. Everyone was afraid of Google getting too powerful, since they know so much about you. If Facebook pulls a move like this off, they’ll have control over most of the conversations that happen online – not an idea I’m comfortable with.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree. And you know what? I think, while it is practical, it is also sad. I miss receiving letters, first of all. But e-mails are also nice. But those facebook messages usually are super unpersonal. Even more unpersonal than e-mail. Why? If you ask me, I think its because it is so darn easy. Leave a “Hey, how are you?” or “Happy Birthday” on the wall, or send a quick message saying barely anything.
I am not really interested in 200 little Happy Birthday wallposts from people that usually never talk to me and just are connected with me, cause, well, we did once know each other and its easy. And from the people that I really love I prefer a phonecall or a card, and a wallpost isnt really adequate. But those things shift throughout time, thats just how it is.
And yes, facebook is a giant data collector, just like Google. People often just don’t realize it, cause facebook is “cuter”…
Just my 2 cents.
Given the track record Facebook has with taking privacy and data-ownership seriously, it seems to be a very bad idea to have Facebook even more in your life that you already have.
It also reminds me way too much of the discussion AOL vs. Internet of the late 90ties and seeing how many serious business people are still using their aol.com e-mail address, Facebook might be onto something with the younger generations. I also believe that Gmail is the best e-mail client that’s out there and with the really bad FB interface, that was never serious in actually be useful on an advanced level, I would not be able to switch anytime soon.
I get about 400 e-mail per day (not counting any spam) and thank god only about 10 FB messages a week. I am also more on the boomer side of the age groups and I grew old with the open, messy Internet. I have yet to see a challenge to the various, very well functioning Internet standards of HTTP, FTP, SMTP and so forth.
I left Facebook because I realized that a 15 min phone call with an old friend, whom I haven’t seen for years, was a so much more richer experience than 2 years of Facebook mails. Also I did waste too much time on FB. I value Twitter and E-Mail more because I can connect to people I don’t know and possibly don’t want to know in my private life. (One probably doesn’t want business contacts to see pictures of you drunken at some random party.)
I don’t want to have virtual relationships with real friends, although it works fine via Facebook for loose contacts. I like Twitter because it lets you connect to people who would never accept you as friends in Facebook. Facebook is to exclusive and that will be its downfall in my opinion.
Also Facebook is very expensive in terms of privacy (read Facebook Beacon) and you might never get your posts back if your are careless, for instance quit Facebook before deleting every single post in any groups or walls. These posts are underwritten with your full birth name and might be there for the next dozens of years.
Faceboook might be great for some (in fact 500mio), but I will look forward to join Diaspora soon.
Great article!
I agree that Facebook is definitely making some big moves and will likely acquire at least a couple hundred million email users relatively quickly. I also think that a lot of people will try out and use their new facebook email address, while still maintaining their other email address[es] on the side. Who wouldn’t want an @facebook.com email address? Yet, as long as the “Facebook” name is connected with the idea of a casual, personal social networking website for friends and family, the email address will have a little trouble taking users completely. On the other hand, young people might adopt it fully and use it for the rest of their lives (assuming Facebook stays around for that long).
Either way, very interesting to think about. Thanks!
I really don’t like Facebook and I avoid to spend time there as much as I could but eventually I can’t avoid it much. In the end, nobody would like to left behind. Considering I work over the net, having an account in one of those popular social sites is a huge plus (for individuals and companies).
Years ago, over the internet portals were real rising stars. Over the years there were too many information and 1 portal just wasn’t enough to keep track of all events going on, on cyber world and real one.
I truly hope, web sites & companies like Facebook, Google will not try to generalize all internet (shopping, news, articles, etc) to try to control all areas over the internet. I just hope this is not going slowly there.