This is I think a very interesting question. With the emergence of countless startups and big changes from majors players — Google Wave, Facebook Connect — an important questions seems to be how these new technologies will impact web use.
I read an interesting article ( here ) about how Facebook should “adopt” Google Wave. I’m going to go ahead and say this is an unbelievable idea. First, although I think its a little sad, Google Wave is not really catching on as it should. It is still a part of smaller niche circles. This could change in the future, but really now, the problem is that there is no impetus to switch to Google Wave (even though it is awesome).
This is why the Facebook idea is amazing. Facebook could be the next big email. They have everyone on the web on their site for hours at a time, but unfortunately have a horrible inbox and mail program. This could easily change if they gave everyone an @facebook email, and made their inbox a full fledged real-time email client. It’s easy to connect to your friends on Facebook, and people are all there anyways. A searchable, organizable email program is the best thing Facebook could do right now.
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But to answer the bigger question about what’s next for the web, it seems to me that everything is just getting to be really easy, as it should be. Facebook Connect now has a three-step wizard (admittedly a little harder than that, but still cool). Video chat is now a given, and sites like tinychat.com are just making it even easier.
This is hardly scratching the surface, but for me the overriding idea for the changing web is ease of use. What do you think?
This post is several years old, but I care to ask if you have the same view point as you did back in 2009 about this topic?
Facebook has provided emails to everyone on there system you can send to the email address’s remotely but can not access them in any way but via facebook its self. I am not sure if you were aware of this or not.
It takes some sleuthing to find your personal address, and a good start is via m.facebook. or touch.facebook. The email address was originally intended to post remotely pictures and other information but that has since changed with there changing of the facebook interface.