View From the Phlipside - Facebook E-mail

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

If there is one thing that the world wide web seems to be really, REALLY good at doing it’s coming up with products and/or services that don’t seem to have any reason for existing.  Most recently we saw Google launch then kill the service called Wave.  Wave was designed to create some kind of super sharing work space where you could bring together all kinds communications in the same place for some glorious cause.  The problem became that most of us couldn’t find a reason to use it.  So Google pulled the plug.

For me the latest in the “So What Do I Do With This?” derby has to be Facebook’s e-mail service that isn’t an e-mail service.  Yes, you get a Facebook e-mail account but it’s not really e-mail Mark Zuckerberg assures us.  It’s MORE.  I’ll grant him that but I’m still trying to figure out - more what?

Once again the idea is to bring all kinds of things all together in one nice big pile.  You’ll get your Facebook messages, e-mails, texts and chat sessions all in one place.  Plus you’ll get histories of all your conversations stored by person so now you can track everything you’ve ever said.  And the system will give priority to your Facebook friends (and their friends) and consign everyone else to a separate file.

The idea is that this will make your life simpler bycreating a single messaging system.  What I see as I look at this is anything but.  My email is clogged enough with various items, newsletters and other stuff I need to keep an eye on as it is.  I don’t want my Facebook messages mixed in with the important stuff .  I am sure it will shock Mr. Zuckerberg to discover I place a significantly lower importance to Facebook in my life.  I don’t want my texts in here at all since they are almost always time sensitive, I get them, I respond and I never want to look at most of them again.  Instead they will now be even more dead wood to be cleared away.

Oh and the Facebook e-mail function won’t have all the functions of a REAL e-mail service so it’s not even going to eliminate accounts for me.

So here we go once again.  A fabulous new service for which there really doesn’t appear to be any need.  As if my life isn’t complicated enough already.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.