Facebook's Gmail Killer Email: The Expectation Is In The Air

Image via WikipediaThis day - Monday - is going to be all about Facebook's email service. It has been touted as the Gmail killer. That is a tall wall to climb. If they deliver, that will create a new wave for them.

I think they will present something that is pretty compelling. This is Facebook, after all. But as to how much of a departure from Gmail it will be, that is anyone's guess.

I personally am very glad that a company the size of Facebook is tackling the inbox. The inbox is so raw. And I hope this step by Facebook will make Google sit up a little. It has been lazy with Gmail.

The Web Lifestyle And Company Cultures

Image via CrunchBaseThese three articles below are great reads on the web lifestyle and the company cultures of Google and Facebook.

BBC: Cult Of Less: Living Out Of A Hard Drive: Chris Yurista, a Washington, DC resident who lives out of a backpack, claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions ..... Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items ..... a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. ..... credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. ..... the internet has replaced my need for an address ...... Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value ...... spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one. ...... he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions ...... his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance. ...... replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking ...... "you never know where you will sleep". ...... And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. ...... some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. ..... He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.
GigaOm: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus:Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure......And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well. ....... Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms ...... One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. ...... receiving avid investor interest in their new projects ..... Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally ..... examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter ...... Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. ..... efreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
GigaOm: Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus:The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them......Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” ....... when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.” ..... engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google ..... Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Early Facebook Employee Exodus (nytimes.com)
• Amid All the New Hires, a Few Early Facebook Employees Slip Out the Door (insidefacebook.com)
• Gen Y lifestyle no longer covets 'material things', only digital media that u can store on a hard drive (altreport.hipsterrunoff.com)
• Guy Who Says He Owns 84% Of Facebook Produces Another Cancelled Check To Mark Zuckerberg (webguild.org)
• Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus (gigaom.com)
• Why Facebook Would Buy Chai Labs (Liz Gannes/GigaOM) (techmeme.com)
• Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive (bbc.co.uk)
• Cult of less (bbc.co.uk)
• Three Engineers Who Made Facebook Something 500 Million People Love Just Quit (businessinsider.com)
• The Early Facebook Employee Exodus (gigaom.com)