Facebook has its own e-mail service. It is made to help Facebook users help people connect more easily with their friends. You can have one full history of all your communication to one friend. Everything is together therefore easier to manage. Facebook is improving how people communicate on-line (or at leat trying to). By doing so, Facebook is putting itself in direct competition with Google.
For the whole story http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131338144
How does Facebook make money outside of the adds? How does Google make money? What is the significance of the competition, if any? Unfortanetly, the podcast didn't give that information, but it aroused my curiosity.
As an avid Facebook user, I appreciate the new feature. I can attest to the all-over-the-place-edness of Facebook's communication system. When the IM is down, people send regular messages. If that's down, they'll write on my wall and the cycle will begin all over again. Essentially, I have many disconnected conversations on conversation. The new feature would elliviate that problem for the most part. I believe creating it was a good idea.
Their are positives and negatives to everything. Would the new feature be some kind of advantage to hackers? Who would the history be accessible to? How does Facebook plan on explaining everything to the users (and doing it in Terms & Agreements or making a long drawn-out statement is not adequate because the majority of Facebook Users wouldn't read them)? Will Facebook try to do anything to prevent phising from occuring on its email database? I'm not trying to sound paranoid, by Web Technologies has caused me to be alert and ask questions about these things. We've learned about extreme hacking cases where hackers steal millions of dollars out of a bank without going anywhere near the bank physically and viruses that can spread through e-mail attachments. If Facebook wants to compete with Google, it has to be able to answer these questions.
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