You’ve Got FMail

The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it’s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it’s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit’s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn’t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he’s gone — off to Y Combinator to continue his angel investing. And I’m gone — from email. Have been for a while now. I still use email all the time. Or rather, it uses me. I watch colleagues at work (Salesforce.com) bounce back and forth from Outlook and Gmail, selecting, reading, skimming, and oh yes, deleting, deleting, deleting. You have to do that in Outlook, to stay ahead of the Mailbox is Full message. Gmail, not really, but it’s hard to break the old habit. And recently I had to start paying for that privilege, when Google stopped raising the limit and converted me to a cloud customer.