Why on Earth Would You Email from Facebook?

I have seen a lot of complaints by people about Facebook's messaging not being as feature rich as they would like. They are really wanting something that is more like email than a typical intrasite messaging service. I'm a bit in the middle on this one. On one hand, sure it'd be nice to have messages work more like email, but at the same time, if I want something that works like email, I'm just going to use email. It's been said that the messaging is hardly ever used (I have no idea if that's correct, but empirical evidence supports it), and that usage would likely increase if it were more feature rich. I'm not sure if I agree on that part. If Facebook had a more robust messaging system, would people really use it more, or would they still rely on email? I'll be real honest, I rarely send a message on Facebook. If I do, it is usually to someone that I know, but don't know their address (either they don't have one shown, or they aren't on my friends list yet). If I know someone's email, that's what is going to get used to contact them.

What brought this topic up at the moment is Facebook's new ability to email people using the messaging. Just start a new message like you would otherwise, and type in an email address. Type your message, hit send, and you've sent your email. Two quick things. First, if you put in the email address of one of your friends that they have listed with Facebook, it will detect this, and instead of emailing them, you'll simply Facebook message them. Second, if you put in someone's email address that's on Facebook but not your friend, then it will still email them rather than just send them a message. Now, here's the little part about this that is a bit annoying. The person that you email doesn't actually see the message in the email. Instead, they get the subject of the message, and then a link to go read the actual message.

As I'm sure you can guess, the page with their message on it has all the "sign up now" sort of stuff on it for Facebook. While I can understand why they'll include something in the message about signing up, making the recipient have to click a link, go to a page, see their ads there, and read their message is a bit of a pain. I think that that will kill a lot of usage right there. Just in case, by some chance, someone actually did decide to just send an email via Facebook rather than an actual email (I really don't know why you'd do that), once the receiver got it and complained it'd likely be the last time. Also, sending an email this way means that you'll have to know the person's email in your head, something that fewer and fewer people do as emails become like phone numbers. On top of that, if you're going to be emailing your friend, they probably are already on Facebook, which means they won't get an email that's just get a message. Which might be exactly what Facebook wants. Anything they can do to keep you on their site longer is good for them.