If Facebook's messaging service was just their version of Gmail or Hotmail, I wouldn't see an issue with it. Providing a way to use the Thunderbird interface as

If Facebook's messaging service was just their version of Gmail or Hotmail, I wouldn't see an issue with it. Providing a way to use the Thunderbird interface as a substitute to other interfaces for existing email protocols is fine. But providing an interface to perpetuate that walled-off Facebook-User-to-Facebook-User experience seems counter-productive. And, really, what person is going to both discover and use Thunderbird if their primary interface with the world is Facebook? They probably find Facebook by typing it into Google every morning. Worse would be if they were talking about actually making the whole facebook experience part of Thunderbird. That you could not only communicate through Thunderbird via the Facebook messaging service, but actually read and post "wall" updates. Talk about feature bloat. (I know there's no reason to expect that they're going to do this - it's all speculation . . . though I'm sure if it's not going to be part of Thunderbird, it'll become part of Firefox). When you get to the point that you're facilitating status updates on services through an email client, is it still just about communication? Twitter certainly isn't as much about communication as it is pimping your company or self (or persona) to the world. A rather one-sided "look at me" conversation. At that point, I don't know how we determine what Thunderbird shouldn't facilitate. Should it provide a customized interface to updating your Wordpress website? Or your Drupal site? (I know some things have APIs that let you just send an email to a service and have the data added to it, such as the add-by-email functionality that pinboard.in has - but I think we're talking about specific added functionality beyond that in the client). Where do we then differentiate the browser and the email client? It starts to sound like Thunderbird isn't so much an email client for email communications, but that Firefox as a "receive" device and Thunderbird is a "send" device.