Features

Emailing by Facebook? Good luck

Integrating email with everything else looks fiendishly tricky (Charles Arthur, The Guardian) Did you go “uh?” when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new email system isn’t email? Don’t worry – so did everyone else. Facebook’s plans for integrating email, text messaging, instant messaging (aka “SMS” and “IM”) and Facebook messages are technology’s equivalent of the Schleswig- Holstein Question: only three people understand it, and one is mad and another is dead. Well, Zuckerberg’s not dead. But integrating email with, well, everything else is a trick no one has ever managed to pull off. Here’s how it might work.

byPC Tech

November 16, 2010

Mark Zuckerberg unveils Facebook's new messaging service in San Francisco. Seen as a direct rival to Google's Gmail, it integrates all web and text-based communications and works instantaneously

You’re on Facebook on your computer at home, and you start chatting to a friend using its Chat facility. Then, say, you leave home but you’re using your smartphone’s Facebook app: there you can continue the chat. And if your friend leaves their computer and heads out with just a dumbphone that can only do texts, they’ll still be able to contact you. Or if your friend gets a smartphone, and starts checking their email, in time (not yet) the conversation will continue in email. A huge, horrendously long, never-ending email of your conversation.

Sounds simple to do; in fact, it is hideously complicated. Facebook has had 15 programmers working for more than a year on this, and it’s still not cooked. If Zuckerberg has solved this problem, we’ll all cheer – though if it means we all have to live inside Facebook.com, maybe not.

byPC Tech

Published November 16, 2010