Facebook Mail: 10 Things You Need to Know
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Mail today. Here are ten things you need to know about it:
1) Everyone will get an @facebook email address, but slowly, at sometime over the next few months.
2) It’s based on instant chat, not email.
3) Using your friends and your friend list on Facebook, Facebook will filter your messages into messages from your good friends and stuff you care less about – bills, random mail shots etc will be in a different box to the ones from your good friends.
4) Email will end up in the Facebook inbox too, but it will only be part of what Facebook Mail does.
5) It will seamlessly integrate with Facebook chat – chat and mails will all flow into the one place. Send someone an email, it will go to this inbox, write them an email or send them a chat message, it will go there too.
6) All your conversations with each person will be archived in one place, stretching back to the beginning. You’ll be able to see all your wall posts, chats, emails and pictures with one person in one place.
7) Facebook Mail will deliver messages to different places depending what you have and where you are…it will know whether it should send a message as a text or a push notification or as a Facebook chat message on a PC. The engineer said this was designed so that it would be smart, and that users wouldn’t have to think about what was going where, though he added that users will have to play with this to get it right.
8) Zuckerberg got his idea for Facebook Mail from talking to teenagers who find email too slow but love using SMS and instant chat.
9) There will be advertising in Facebook mail, the same way that the rest of Facebook has ads – boxes popping up on the top right.
10) This is not a Gmail-Killer – Zuckerberg took a question about this, made an awkward joke and reiterated this earlier point that this is different to email. Thou
“they have a great product, email is important to a lot of people, but we just think people will increasingly want a new simple system..”
