As I watched Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yammer on and on yesterday about Facebook’s new messaging service, which he claimed really and truly wasn’t e-mail, I kept thinking: “Yawn. It’s e-mail, and it’s bad e-mail at that.”
Oh sure, it includes SMS and IM as well, but so what? Other Web-based e-mail systems, like my Gmail account sitting in another window as I write this, have been all-in-one communication centers for years. Heck, back when I was using Lotus Notes and Sametime on a regular basis years ago I could do this. Come on guys, unified e-mail is sooo 1995.
So what does Facebook Messages really bring to the table? I don’t see anything. To quote my wife Clara Boza, a legal marketing consultant, “Why would I want to use Facebook messaging?” Why, indeed. It’s just another damn e-mail account to check.