I know: Let's send our email (oops, not email) through Facebook too!

Jeez, people are being a bit snide about Mark Zuckerberg (uh, yeah, OK. Guilty).

In the midst of coverage of Facebook’s new ‘it’s not email’ announcement today, look at this little dig from The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt …

He was especially keen to stress one point. “It’s not email,” he said early in his presentation. “It’s true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it’s not email.”

The new service, which will be called Facebook Messages, will offer a social inbox and “seamless messaging”, a clearly excited Zuckerberg said.

What that means is that if users so wish the company will now begin to compile their chatter from across four platforms: text messages, instant messages (IMs), emails and messages sent on Facebook.

The Facebook chief executive said that, in addition to the benefit of the software pooling messages from different devices, another boon would come as Facebook Messages provided the ultimate in spam and message filtering – a feat that existing email services have never fully accomplished, he suggested.

“There are a lot of different classes of junk, and it’s really difficult for any email system to know [that] ‘this is a person who is sending me a legitimate message but you just don’t care about what they have to say’,” he said, displaying a glimpse of the social awareness – or lack of – for which he is famed.

Oh, right, so says Adam Gabbatt, displaying a dose of the coffee breath for which he is … er, no, wait, hang on.  I know what Z. means. Don’t you?

On another level, you’d think Mark ‘pooling messages from different sources’ Zuckerberg might have learnt that archive records of previous messages can, um, come back to bite you.
Remember this:

… to prepare for litigation against the Winklevosses and Narendra, Facebook’s legal team searched Zuckerberg’s computer and came across Instant Messages he sent while he was at Harvard. Although the IMs did not offer any evidence to support the claim of theft, according to sources who have seen many of the messages, the IMs portray Zuckerberg as backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive.

Gabbatt again:

Whether this next generation will want to see every single utterance they have ever exchanged with their incumbent is a different matter – one can imagine good reason for not recording some heat-of-the-moment remarks for all eternity.

Which is a hole-in-one, as far as I’m concerned, about the whole Facebook experience. (He said, blogging.)

As another analyst quoted in The Guardian story said: “The key for FB’s success with messaging will be whether they get the PRIVACY settings right first time.”  Agreed.