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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

Facebook message cannot replace email until I can contact people who are not on Facebook through it.

I do not want to have a social connection to everyone I exchange messages with. I swap occasional emails with workmates, but that doesn't mean that I want to see their every move in my status updates.

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I'm not sure if you already got the invitation to the new Facebook Messages, but yes you can contact people off Facebook. It gives you an email address that other people off Facebook can contact you.

I'm not sure why they're doing the Gmail-style invite-based roll out because that diminishes the fun, but it might be due to capacity.

It would be a trivial addition to the Facebook network to allow outside email exchanges. What I was trying to get across in the article was how Facebook is just 1 step away from directly challenging Google in email and search. Two of the biggest areas of revenue for Google. They have the purpose (money) and they have the ability. I think they're going to do it sooner than anyone expects.

yes but your trivial "1 step" is actually - build a world class, global scale search engine that is at least as good as googles. There is no sign whatsoever that they are even trying - search in facebook is pretty basic IMO and frequently fails to find stuff I have found before using the same keywords

If they build a space ship, something that they are also "1 step" away from doing they can eat Virgins lunch too!

Sorry, I meant the email functionality is 1 step and trivial, since they already have an inbox system in place. The search would be much more difficult to do well of course, but i'd suggest a recommendation based search (like Google +1) could be up and running within a year quite easily given their resources.

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