What's its name? Facemail?

It was in the news, but honestly, nobody is paying a lot of attention.

Facebook has announced that this Monday, they will make available their email services. At the time of this writing, it is not clear what enhancements are they incorporating into their Inbox feature, other than a dedicated email address.

I have been watching social media for a while (click here to see my 2008 rant) and I never saw Facebook as an email killer, but more like an Outlook killer. Think about it, What does Outlook do for you in a typical office environment? Integrates your contacts, communications, and takes care of your appointments and resource booking. There is not a lot that Facebook is missing out of these.

There are four things that I would point out with Facebook's announcement:

1.- Facebook does stand a chance. Email is becoming more and more just a transport layer and a notification mechanism. If I look at how my two daughters use their online resources, it is easy to come to this conclusion. They do have email addresses, to be able to "communicate with the dead", but they rarely check them. They communicate through Facebook and SMS, and email's function is reduced to make the vibrating device go off on their smartphones. If the notification piece is solved, Why send an email? You already have that message in FB's Inbox. It seems that something in these lines is coming with the announced Office Online integration.

2.- We need more. Some said this will be a GMail killer. Well, not until we get the gazillion storage capacity, the external email address, the capacity to SEND emails to people that are not on Facebook, Offline and mobile client access, resource management, iCal and VCard translation, multiple addresses to be able to manage your online personas, distribution lists, better threaded conversations, and -Oh Yeah!- better search. This is without even factoring in Google Buzz (or Wave?), which is a truly revolutionary way of communicating.

3.- What about voice? Nobody cares anymore? I do. Google has a nice foothold here, both with the Android operating system running on phones, Google Voice, and Google Talk's capacity to do VoIP. And it is not just a telephone, it looks more like your personal switchboard and unified communications platform. Facebook has a shy attempt at something like this with their partnership with Vonage, but again, no way to call anybody outside of Facebook, and what is even worse, no way to call anybody ON Facebook that does not have the Vonage app on their mobile.

4.- We still need more. There has been some comparisons with GMail's priority Inbox -which I think is the best thing after email search-. Facebook has insight into what is important for you, and what is not. So -in theory- they may be able to classify email according to this. The question here is, Can they do it better? Right now, honestly, they are not there yet. Facebook filters out stuff that I am interested in and stuff that is new to me and I would have never given a chance other way.

And let's face it, we do have "circles of friends", we have the "A" list, the "B" list, the acquaintances; people from work, and family. On top of this, our interests change. When I am looking to move to another city, or just go there for a short trip, I focus on friends that live there. If I am having parenting issues, I turn to friends that have same age kids as mine. These are all things that are not necessarily reflected in my status updates. Facebook makes it -in the best case- laborious to track these changes.

One thing is true. They got us to write about them, not on email but on a blog, and announce it on Facebook.