Motherboard

If you use email, you probably use Gmail. And you are about to start thinking about using Fmail. Facebook is set to launch its new email service today, which, given the number of users the site already captivates on a daily basis (500 million vs. Gmail’s 170 million) and its huge emphasis on social connections, could be a serious competitor to the Google monster.

The lines had already been drawn in the silicon sand by the country’s two tech behemoths, but last week things got particularly heated over the confusing (and pretty hypocritical) issue of how and whether you can export your contact lists (see this somewhat whiny warning from Google.)

A minor twist in this epic battle (in which it feels like we’re just the pawns): the inventor of Gmail (and the on-again off-again slogan “Don’t Be Evil”), Paul Buchheit, had been working at Facebook ever since the company bought FriendFeed. Curiously, he left Facebook last week for incubator YCombinator, but not before talking to the LA Times. (By the way: Google just gave its top executives a 30% raise, on top of the 10% raises it handed out to everyone recently. Is that ka-ching the sound of fear?)

He did not work on a competitor to his former employer’s email service, he says, because he’s bored with email. But he did work on a system that allows you to download your data from Facebook in a zip file, which, he says – in a possible snipe at Google in this personal data battle – would be nice to have on Gmail. He also praises Facebook’s focus, something that Google doesn’t have.

Q: How was Facebook different from Google?

A: A lot of the differences are subtle. On the surface, they seem similar. They have the same people in many cases. They have a nice cafe and those things. But really the way things are run is quite a bit different. Mark is very involved in really all of the key product decisions at a very detailed level. It’s a much more focused product in terms of it’s just Facebook and there’s a strong desire to keep it that way. Google has a much more diverse approach and the founders operate at a level more like a venture capitalist. They have a number of different products they are interested in: autonomous cars, Street View, search. All these different things from the outside look like they are unrelated. But of course the connection is that those are the interests of the founders. It ends up creating a very different culture. Also, the history of the two companies is very different. Google came out of a Stanford research project so it always had a very academic flavor to it. They were PhD students who hired other PhD students from the start. Facebook had more of a dorm room hacker origin. Mark and his friends put together the site very fast and had a much less academic view on things. They have more of a move fast and break stuff mentality which is one of the slogans there.

Q: Facebook is getting ready to launch an e-mail product. Did you work on a “Gmail killer” while you were at Facebook?

A: No, I did not. One of the downsides of having worked on something like that that was notable is that everyone keeps expecting that you are going to work on that again. I have very little desire to work on e-mail again in the future. To me, there’s a lot more interesting stuff out there.

Q: What did you work on at Facebook?

A: Miscellaneous different things. My most recent project was the beta downloader that we shipped a month ago in which you get your profile in a zip file. It’s fun to be able to get all of your history, all of your photos, all of your blog posts, all of your messages going back years in one file. I think it would be really nice if that kind of thing became a standard: to get all of the data out of Gmail in a zip file, for example. It would be a very convenient thing to have. Of course, there are APIs you can use for a lot of services like Gmail to do that. But who does that? Those are a lot of work to set up versus just going to the site and clicking on a link and getting a giant zip file.

The whole fight over how you can download or export your data is funny (in a not-very-funny kind of way) because this isn’t about your ability to access your data – an ability you already have – but rather these companies’ ability to access your data. Because neither of them would exist without that data, and without their ability to sell it, index it, mine it for all kinds of juicy information about who you are, where you are, what you want, and what you’ll want next.

That’s all easy to forget of course when you’re breezing through the terms of service on your way to a fancy new email address, social network, or what have you.

Read the interview at the LA Times.