Will Facebook replace the United States Postal Service?

By Flint Lane of Billtrust

Facebook and the United States Postal Service (USPS) are two organizations that have virtually nothing in common. One is a profitable enterprise that Hollywood is making movies about. The other is a government-run organization losing billions of dollars per year. What, if anything, could they have in common?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what's going to happen with the USPS. It's clear that their business model is broken and without an act of Congress, literally, they'll just continue to lose billions each year. I don't blame the folks that run the USPS, they work hard, but they're stuck with a business model that just doesn't work.

When I do the Billtrust sales pitch for electronic billing, it usually goes something like this: "How much sense does it make for a biller to take an electronic billing feed, print it on paper, put it in an envelope, mail it to me so I can then attach a check and mail it back?" Sounds pretty stupid, right? Well, why are the majority of bills still delivered via the USPS? The answer is actually pretty simple; it's still the only mechanism that can reliably reach everybody.

Below I lay out what a new "electronic post office" has to have in order to replace the USPS and why I think Facebook could easily position themselves for this.

1. Universal Deliverability - Facebook claims 150 millions active US users today and growing rapidly. While certainly not universal, they're certainly getting there with the ability to reach the majority of Americans.

2. Effective Communication Platform - Facebook falls short here quite frankly. Posting a status update is interesting and a great way to stay in touch with friends, but Facebook, in my opinion, has fallen on their face as a communication tool. What Facebook really needs here is a GMail like email interface so that people/businesses could send stuff to your @facebook.com address. Now this certainly would introduce enormous spamming opportunities. Facebook could impose some kind of insignificant email tariff to prevent rampant abuse. I've blogged about this in the past (here). I know most people think they get a lot of paper junk mail, but there is actually an effective tariff in place to limit this, it's called postage. I wouldn't mind receiving some junk email if they went through a system that actually had some controls in place. Charging $0.001 per email wouldn't be unreasonable and would keep out the blatant spammers.

3. Privacy - I don't get myself too worked up about my online privacy because I think the measures that most companies take are far more effective than the offline world. However, there are certainly opportunities for abuse here. I would suggest taking a portion of the tariffs collected from above to pay a third party to monitor privacy on a regular basis.

4. Payments - The majority of mail that people get, that is of any importance, are bills. That's because they require the user to take an action - return a payment. Facebook doesn't have this today but this is not a big effort.

Other have tried to become the universal mailbox. My first company Paytrust did this for bills. Zumbox and EarthClassMail are trying to do this for all other forms of mail. But all three suffer from the chicken and the egg problem. Which is to say that until they have enough users, billers and other mailers don't want to bother enabling electronic delivery to them. And users won't sign up, until they can get a majority of their mail through the channel.

That's why I think Facebook, if they want, is well positioned to do this because they already have the user base. Economically I think it would be a slamdunk. Who else could do this? Maybe Google with GMail but I like Facebook's chances better.