Facebook rolls out full webmail and text messaging system
Would you trust Facebook to act as your mail server and text message forwarding service?
PHONING IT IN
Once you’ve set up your email address, you’ll be given the option of enabling Facebook’s text messaging service. This allows your friends to use Facebook Messages to send text messages to your phone. This is either incredibly useful, particularly for dumbphone users who don’t have internet access while they’re out and about, or incredibly intrusive. Fortunately, you don’t have to sign up for the service.
Setting up text messaging
Another handy option for those with privacy concerns is that you don’t have to publish your phone number. The default option adds it to your profile, but you can keep it secret. Doing this allows Facebook friends to send you texts but doesn’t reveal your number to them.
We hit some technical problems when we first tried to register our phone with the service, but everything went smoothly by the time we made our second attempt. It’s a fast and convenient way of allowing friends to reach you quickly when you’re away from your PC, but it’s less clear who will be paying for these texts. Based on the message we received from Vodafone when we registered, which informed us that “SMS charges may apply”, texts will probably be charged to the recipient, but there’s little information available one way or the other.
VERDICT
Facebook Messages has a few nice features – we were particularly keen on the ability to let our friends send us text messages without giving away our phone number. However, the whole system feels clumsy and lacks polish – Facebook has a long way to go if it hopes to rival Google’s Gmail.
The inability to ever delete anything is also troubling – you’ll never be able to forget ill-advised 3am declarations of drunken love. With the convenient default assignment of firstname.lastname@facebook.com email address, it’ll also be a tempting target for spammers – only time will tell how spam-resistant the system will be.
Despite its obvious flaws and limitations, it’s equally obvious that a lot of people will use Messages for email. A significant percentage of web users already use Facebook as their main interface for all online interaction, and it’s these people who will most enthusiastically adopt their facebook.com email addresses. Love it or loathe it, Facebook Messages has a built-in audience, and we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t take off in a big way.
