My interest was recently piqued by Anita Chang’s blog post about the new email service being introduced by Facebook.
There’s been great buzz generated by Facebook’s latest move, especially around this notion of the “email killer” in general. With this new feature, no longer will you have to log onto your Facebook account to check social updates and then your respective hotmail/gmail accounts for more work-related things, now its all integrated under one umbrella of FACEBOOK. Consider this; Facebook has over 500 million active users, now take these users and at @facebook.com to their names. They already have a huge potential market at their fingertips.
I don’t see Facebook taking over the email world though. I know of many people who have more than one email addresses to their name (I have three) and use them each for different reasons (i.e. one professional, one for social emails).
A primary use of email is for business purposes. In the minds of most business people today, email is for work and Facebook is for social/private life. The latter has no room in ones office because it is both unproductive and unprofessional. This idea of separation between Facebook and work-life will be a big problem Facebook faces when trying to reach out to email-users who use email for work-related purposes. The unprofessional stigma attached to Facebook may deter many email users from switching to use Facebook as their primary email source.
I think the largest market for a Facebook email are for younger people (those currently in high school) have grown up in this age of social media. They will be more likely to adapt to using Facebook for all interactive purposes (including email sending).
I see this added feature of Facebook email leading to many people staying on Facebook for a much longer period of time/visit as well as increasing their visits/day however, as far as will Facebook be the “email killer”, I highly doubt that.
