Jason Murphy

There’s a new ISP in town: Facebook Unleashed its Titan.

May 13, 2011 Business & Marketing, Email Marketing

RIP Email Marketing as we know it.

Facebook just released its Project Titan, which is their email ISP platform. It allows users to have an @facebook.com email address that integrates directly into their Facebook account.

This is genius on Facebook’s part. It keeps the user logged into Facebook that much longer. Now they can share photos of the kids, chat, get “where r u” updates from check-ins, see who likes what pages of the internet, who’s in complicated relationships and nasty break-ups, play some dumbass Zynga games, and give up all their privacy rights without realizing it… AND now check their email at the same time.

What’s different about this system vs. Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and others is that each user serves as their own gatekeeper. Only messages from connected Facebook friends and conversations initiated by the user are allowed in the inbox by default. Any third-party messages are sent to an “other” box. And if the domain/ISP/brand isn’t trusted by FB’s postmaster yet, it doesn’t even get delivered. At least the FB postmaster does send a gracious bounce response back to the sender stating the user doesn’t like you yet so you can’t talk to them.

In a discussion thread with some colleagues, I talked about how this is changing the game of email marketing:

“They aren’t dealing with false positives, at all. Every message from someone who isn’t already a connected friend on Facebook goes directly to your junk box. You have to manually let third-party senders into your inbox with a rule.

In theory, this makes their junk box actually have a higher intrinsic value than other ISPs. Habitually, I never check junk boxes. But now, I’ll feel a need to because ALL mail from new senders will filter there by default.

In dog training, they call this behavior modification.”

The response: B F Skinner would be proud of Zuck.

Tags: email, email marketing, facebook