It’s long been the case that in times of stress, I stop responding to email. Right now is a time of extreme stress (this week I have to write a paper, mark an assignment, and have an interview) and I’ve stopped even reading it. I’m monitoring my iPhone for genuine emergencies, but if it doesn’t convey in the first line that it needs my attention now that’s it. No response. Sorry, I’ll read it next week – unless there’s something more important on. I haven’t checked Facebook in days, and this morning I though – I could just suspend my account. And then realized I couldn’t, because yesterday someone said to me:
You’re on Facebook, right? Everyone’s on Facebook.
And I’ve got something on Wednesday, which is still TBC… but I have someone on my Facebook – and don’t have their email address.
I am, in effect, locked in to Facebook. Not because I myself depend on it, but because other people do.
This is why we should be interested in Facebook’s Project Titan – a full featured web-mail. What I’d like it to have is IMAP, so I could just get my email from my email client, remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and probably disable my wall.
However for the people who already use Facebook for most of their communication, what will the ability to, I don’t know, send attachments and email people not on Facebook bring?
They won’t need a regular email address anymore.
I know, this seems horrifying. But you know what? Some people still use Hotmail. I don’t just mean have a Hotmail account, I mean use it as their primary email. Like, they’d send a CV from it! Even though Microsoft took a bunch of features standard in every other (free!) email client out in a bid to make people pay for it. Now they’ll just use Facebook instead.
For those of us who’d like to quit Facebook, but can’t, what will this mean? I think we may be even more locked in than we were before. It is notoriously difficult to delete your Facebook account and it’s not going to get any easier if our friends abandon email for FBmail.
What do you think?