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Why does Facebook's email feature get press?
The New York Times covers Facebook's email program today in E-Mail Gets an Instant Makeover.
It's not clear why Facebook continues to get enthusiastic press coverage for its email feature. The Facebook email program offers no CC, no BCC, no subject lines (in the upcoming version, according to the article), no forwarding, no local storage, no folders, no tags, no rich text, no document attachments, and no draft capability. Finally, while you can email users outside Facebook, there's no way them to reply, unless they join Facebook.
In other words, Facebook's email is dramatically less featured than the mainframe Darpanet email program I first used in 1989. Maybe I'm too old to understand the significance of Facebook's interface, but so far it seems to be a giant step backwards for email users.
Another interesting feature of the NYT piece is the continued comment on how young people prefer texting over email. Or, to be accurate, texting, IM, and telephoning:
Ms. Hunter says she seeks to reach friends first by text, then by instant message, then with a phone call, and then by e-mail. "And then, while I'd probably never do this last one, showing up at their house."
Don't count email out totally, though... there's that darn workplace that requires the storage, organization, and documentation that texting doesn't yet offer. Emphasis below is mine:
Like a lot of younger people, Ms. Hunter, who works in construction management in San Francisco, says e-mail has its place -- namely work and other serious business, like online shopping. She and others say they still regularly check e-mail, in part because parents, teachers and bosses use it.
Email will be with us for some time... and, apparently, so will the press piece announcing email's demise. (The Wall Street Journal ran its own email-is-dead piece in October 2009 - see my comment.)
Adding to the list of basic features that Facebook's messaging doesn't provide, if someone sends you a message addressed to multiple people, you have no choice but to reply to all. At least as of a couple months ago, there simply was no way to confine your response to just the sender. Unbelievable that such basic functionality isn't included.
It might have something to do with Facebook's terrible reputation with privacy. Who wants to use an email client from a company that has such trouble keeping information safe, and making privacy preferences easy to understand?
I don't use Facebook, and I'm not likely to use it. I just don't see much benefit to it given its downsides, and I still think it's just a fad. Then again, I think (and hope) that Rap is just a fad.
That said, I think any email that doesn't have the ability to bcc is a godsend. The features you've described make clear to me why I haven't heard people complaining about facebook spam: they've removed those features that enable it, and that is a very good thing!
Facebook's world view is wholly different than the common view just a decade ago.
For one, Facebook is pro-cloud - Facebook messages don't support attachments in the traditional sense, however they do in the cloud sense. If you paste in an address to a Youtube video, it displays that as an attached video. Paste in an address to virtually any other web-based content, and Facebook displays it as an attachment. You can take pictures and video directly from facebook, without needing to store locally (at least as far as the user is concerned).
Additionally - Facebook, along with companies like Apple, are understanding users in a non-traditional way. Having the most features is no longer a goal, or even desired. Make something with a shallow learning curve. Make something quick and easy to do the most important things. Make it simple. Make it good.
That's the goal, figure out what most of the people would use most of the time and give them that in an easy interface.
Facebook won't be the end of email, however social interaction on the internet has changed, and email will continue to become a much smaller slice of that pie.
As much as I hate to say it, Facebook messages have two other glaring advantage. You can never lose somebodies email.
Loose your address book? Doesn't matter. Not at your computer? Doesn't matter. Friend changes email address and doesn't tell you? Doesn't matter.
And because it's only people which can use it, it's low volume and has avoided the emotional baggage which email has collected (never empty inbox, oh gawd another email …). This means that many people actually respond to their Facebook messages more promptly then their email.
GMail solves all the same problems more cleanly and doesn't fall down with real volume. Comparing Facebook messaging to desktop IMAP clients hacked together with spit and AppleScript is comparing apples and oranges. Dedicated desktop mail clients, and IMAP in particular, are rapidly-obsolescing last-generation technology.
(I was born in the eighties.)
Interesting strategy - remember when you could send money to someone via email and the only way they could receive it was to join PayPal?
facebook messaging is a brilliant strategy to acquire and enhance another slice of time from each person's day spent online - thus increasing the relevance and effectiveness of the social graph and facebook ad platform.
Imagine for a moment you are 13 and have just joined Facebook - at what point will you need a "full-featured" email application? 3 years, 5 years? By then, the feature set will have significantly improved and Facebook will have captured the personal messaging/email market. Facebook is not challenging or trying to compete with business email applications or gmail - not yet anyway...
I actually wrote a blog article about the supposed "Impending Gmail vs Facebook Email War". Here it is:
http://senderok.wordpress.com/2010/11/22/what-facebook-can-do-to-win-the-new-email-war-vs-google/
I guess I basically said that Facebook will have to work with my company (or copy us) if they want to get serious about email.