Facebook unleashed its email and text feature today. I logged on and found this:

The first step is to activate your Facebook email account. They suggest your website name: /baldevia to be your email address: baldevia@facebook.com. Then you activate your text messaging feature. And then you can start sending messages.

I opted to not activate SMS texting capabilities. I’m more of an online person rather than a SMS text person.

This makes logical sense. Streamlining all your online communications  onto a widely used platform is efficient and useful. The facebook email can send emails to other email systems such as Gmail. I was able to send an email from my Facebook account to Gmail and vice versa. There was no delay in delivery and you can send an attachment from your Facebook email account if you need to upload an attachment from the computer.

I’m kind of disappointed to not see the traditional feature of adding a link, video or image in private message (purely aesthetics) however, the ability to send an attachment is useful as well. Is this setup supposed to encourage users to publicly share links, photos and videos and not use the new email feature for this purpose? Or will Facebook reintroduce those features after they’ve completely integrated the new email, text and chat features?

Some of the new features:

1) You can send a text message to those participating under the text program;

2) You can send an attachment from your computer;

3) You can take and attach a video and/or a picture; and

4) You can opt to complete and send a message by pressing “Enter” and will not need to click “Reply”.