Till We Have FaceMail

My gripe about the lack of fmail was premature: Facebook is set to announce its new mail service on Monday. Whether this move is timed to silence me, only Zuckerberg can say; he's been very disciplined when it comes to bringing me up in casual conversation, so I don't see any reason why he should change now.

I'm glad to see fmail happening, it is a natural outgrowth of Facebook's social preponderance. Rumbles of this being a gmail killer are already being heard, as if Google is the only other party in town. Social network activity historically resembles the boom-and-crash patterns of capitalism, but when it comes to mail service users are not so fickle. How many of your friends use Hotmail? Several of mine still do. What I think will happen is that Facebook will further dominate socnets and folks will stay loyal to their mail providers, as they have for many years running.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying RockMelt -what I fondly refer to as FaceMelt, seeing how full integration of Facebook is its big gun for future browser dominance. I can dig it. The timing is good, dovetailing as it does with fmail hitting the scene: separation of my Google contacts from Facebook friends will be that much cleaner and the cognitive dissonance of mixing and matching between the two will be greatly reduced.