Now Access Facebook Within Gmail With Gmail Facebook integration

Surely many of readers use multiple social networking sites like I do. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, or any other social media site, it gains members by offering a unique feature (at least to start with). Personally I have accounts on all three networks and use Chrome extensions to manage them directly via Chrome.

I also have email accounts on various servers. The most popular of these servers are Gmail, Windows Live (Hotmail), and Yahoo. So every day, I first check my email on each account and then proceed to check any updates on each social media account. Obviously I could immensely use a tool that would integrate email servers with social media websites. Although there are various ways to fuse our social media accounts together, there has yet to be a great tool developed for merging all our email accounts with all social media accounts.

There is however one tool that seems to heading in the right direction: Gmail Facebook Integration.

GFI (Gmail Facebook Integration) is a great browser extension for Chrome which I have only recently discovered. Expecting its behavior to be like most other Chrome extensions, I was surprised when I did not find an additional icon in my address bar after the installation of GFI. I think that at times Chrome extensions unnecessarily occupy space on the address bar thus the absence of an icon was a pleasant change.

The function of this extension is to add a Facebook field to our Gmail account links which we can see in the left panel, from where we access our Inbox, Sent items, Trash, etc.

The first time you click the Facebook link, Facebook will ask for a confirmation of authorization.

After authorization you will be able to access, view, and operate your Facebook account via Gmail.

GFI is still far from perfect. As it usually is with new ideas, users have encountered a number of problems with GFI. This is why after the installation of the extension users are redirected to a message by the developer providing solutions to the most common problems faced. The page is similar to the image below.

If you plan to use this extension regularly, I would advise you to copy the text from this SOLUTIONS page and save it in a TXT file for troubleshooting any problems you face later.