The potentially epic hostilities that have been smoldering over the past few years between Gmail and Facebook have flared up recently, with Facebook now having integrated their new email service into their standard messaging platform. The social titan continues to conquer cyber turf one feature at a time, challenging major ESPs for its slice of email marketing revenue. Facebook has grown into a monumental platform for advertising and communication, which has provided huge opportunities for business. Users can now have their own (FB username)@facebook.com email address to which emails or email newsletters can be sent. On top of that, emails sent to this inbox from your Facebook friends will appear under messages as per usual, while everything else will be displayed in a separate category, named “other. Although still juvenile by mainstream email client standards, this is a shrewd gambit by Facebook, which currently has over 500 million active users clocking over 700 billion minutes per month on its platform. And with the average user connected to over 80 community pages, the viral and integration potential of email newsletter marketing via Facebook is vast. It seems almost common sense that the email service will be used to weave all of Facebook’s services and its over 550,000 active applications together, to create a unified communications and promotional system. Of course, much of where Facebook is ultimately going with their email client is pure speculation due to the tight-lipped development status quo of the company. Interestingly, 33% of Facebook users access their profiles via mobile devices. So the evolution of display quality and functionality of email newsletters through Facebook applications will also be something brands will want to keep a close eye on. Back to more immediate concerns though, GraphicMail has sent a test newsletter to a Facebook email address to see if our templates render well inside the service’s narrow message window. The message delivered stated that HTML is not supported by the email program, and that readers have to follow a link in order to view an online version of the newsletter. So yes, all of the GraphicMail email templates will render well! Facebook is on a roll, having already taken a major share in social search. Even so, clearly it’s still early days for Facebook’s email integration. There’s no telling what tricks their so-called “Gmail killer†will have up its sleeves, and it still remains to be seen how many users will decide to receive all or most of their mail via their Facebook email address rather than their current email address(es), be it a web-based email client like Yahoo, or a business domain address. Intergration is definitely a technological trend, though not necessarily a cultural supported, largely since people will always have practical uses for segmenting their information - above and beyond following the age-old adage of not placing all one's eggs (emails?) into one basket. http://www.graphicmail.com/blog/
