Gmail vs. Fmail (Facebook Mail)
by Stii
Normally, I would be very, very skeptical about anything trying to take on an established, market dominating service. I’m not going to be this time. I think this could be quite a great move by Facebook. Exciting! Will it be as good and properly compete with Gmail? That remains to be seen.
There are two things that would not make me move anytime soon:
- Google Apps. Unless Facebook let me use my own domain for mail, I will not use it seriously.
- Priority Inbox. It has become a tool I cannot live without. I’m not particularly fond of Gmail’s web interface, but their Priority engine made it more than bearable.
That being said, it certainly cannot be ignored. It makes perfect sense. If and when you visit Facebook, you can check in on mail as well. They also have the opportunity to be very clever regarding the integration which could make it a winner. I will use it, just not in a professional capacity.
If I was Google, I’d be worried. This is one I’m looking forward to. Whether or not it will be executed properly, remains to be seen. I hope so. I really hope it won’t be a “oh, we just got to do it, so let us put something out there” job.
Two things on the side:
- The owner of the domain Fmail.com is either going to get bullied or be able to make some money.
- Is it going to look as bland as Facebook itself looks? We really need a funkier, uncluttered mail interface compared to Gmail. We can hope…
Ps: Facebook should look after their mail service. It would quickly be dubbed #failmail should there be problems…
Hi Stii,
i’m a google fan, and love gmail, but the concept of FaceBook mail makes absolute sense and I agree that this is something google will need to compete with.
Facebook have got a captive audience and already have a relatively robust infrastructure. With the right planning and some initiative, they could really pull this off.
On the other hand I see this as an opportunity for Google to come to the party with better and more social functionality. We’ve now got Profiles, Buzz and an array of other products like groups and sites, but I still feel that if they want to go social they need to integrate them more tightly and assist us in reducing noise.
I do like the gmail does not have picture add and the picture add on facebook irritate me, i am actually “blind” to them and generally ignore the right hand side bar.
i’m looking forward to see what comes of this.
I agree. I really am looking forward to check it out. As a side, in Africa lot’s of people use Facebook messaging instead of SMS’s as it is cheaper, so this could be a very welcome feature for them, specially if it is integrated tightly into Facebook apps and their already popular mobile interface.
Agreed. Telecommunications companies are a general rip off and anything people manage to “understand” and be able to leverage so that they can, communicate for less, will no doubt succeed.
I also find that although Gmail offers a mobile app it is horribly slow on my phone compared to the speed of the FB apps that seem to come standard with most phones these days.
Mail is very important to me and I currently use Gmail to manage multiple accounts, FB is lucky in the sense that they can design their service from scratch and truly solve the problems that other webmail service providers have not yet managed to deal with. They can design their entire mail architecture around the wishes of their audience…