Facebook, the world’s largest social networking website launched its email service on Monday night, giving credence to the speculation that Gmail, the popular email service from Google, may soon be ousted from its top spot.Facebook’s service ( users will now get a “@ facebook. com” email ID) is both an email and a messaging service in the sense that it allows users to send and receive messages from different platforms such as SMSes, instant messengers, email, chats and of course, Facebook’s own messaging system. For instance, if you are conversing with a friend over various platforms, you don’t really have to go to different devices to recall those messages.
Facebook does that for you in a single messages page.
The new messages page, which will be rolled out to all 500 million- plus users of Facebook over the next two months or so, will have three folders or categories for their Inbox – Messages, Others and Junk. All the conversations you have with your most important Facebook friends will land in your ‘ Messages’ folder, while the rest go into the ‘ Others’ folder. ‘Spam’ messages will end up in the Junk folder.
There was every reason for Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook to take on the Web’s free email services. “ Email is slow,” he said at a packed media conference in California on Monday night.
According to Facebook, 350 million people on its network use the messaging system every day to send close to four billion messages.
But will it really kill Gmail? Experts say the death of Gmail — and other email services — is vastly exaggerated. At present, even Gmail users can send or receive SMSes (in the US only right now), voice mail, instant messages and email messages all in the same platform.
Moreover, some of your formal contacts may or may not be part of your Facebook network.
As technology blogger Christopher Dawson pointed out in blog for ZDNet : “ For those of us who take Facebook with a grain of salt, this isn’t a game changer. But Google’s continued conspicuously absent social components leave Gmail and its SMS, IM, and voice/ video chat widgets feeling a bit long in the tooth. I mean, everything’s supposed to be social now, right?” Guardian ’s technology blogger Tom Scott said: “ Despite the hyperbolic headlines that will inevitably follow tonight’s launch, the truth is — of course — that Facebook Mail will be neither a swift revolution nor a privacy disaster. It’ll just be another incremental improvement — but perhaps also a step change — in one of many social networks, and another small step forward for our online lives.
It's certainly not the death of email; but neither is it going to cause teens to suddenly start typing long- form messages instead of texting.” One of the other prime concerns with Facebook mail is that it does not allow folders to be created on the fly, which is what all other free email services do. Gmail even allows extensions to your email ID to direct emails to a specific folder for easy retrieval later.
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