I have observed that there has been a recent emergence of numerous applications and tools which combined the social media services we use. I suppose it started when instant messaging clients started offering the integration of two different instant messaging services into a single application (Trillian, for example). Now we have many applications, online and downloadable, which let us integrate our Facebook and Twitter accounts or our accounts on other social media websites.

One such integration tool I have just found out and believe that it is an interesting idea. The name of this tool is Gmail Facebook Integration.

Gmail Facebook Integration is an extension for Chrome. Unlike other extensions, it will not place an icon in your address bar. What it will do is add a Facebook field in the folders of your Gmail account.

Users can click on the Facebook link and have their Facebook account open up right there within Gmail.

I called this idea interesting for a particular reason. Needless to say, this will save Gmail users the time to open their Facebook accounts in a separate window. But more than a timesaving tool, Gmail Facebook Integration fuses an email service together with a social media website whereas other such tools I have seen merge only social media websites together.

This extension has a number of faults which need correcting by the developer. Firstly Facebook returned an error each time I clicked on the Facebook link in Gmail. Facebook provided me an additional link to click; after clicking that link I was able to access my Facebook account. Other improvements which the developer recognizes can be read about on the extension’s official page.

With the development and popularization of Gmail Facebook Integration, I expect other developers to start creating one super-tool that will enable users to fuse various email services and social media websites together. Now that is an interesting idea.