Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted the social networking site’s new messaging system today, in what many tech journalists considered an attempt by Facebook to take on other Web-based e-mail systems. Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch wrote last week about the launch of Project Titan, which has apparently been in development for some time, and has been called a “Gmail killer” by those inside the company. Joshua Norman at CBS quoted projections by analyst Matt Cain, who said it might prioritize e-mail by the closeness of the sender in your list of acquaintances.
So today at 10 a.m. Pacific time, Zuckerberg finally revealed the new system, which isn’t exactly e-mail. The company, in fact, has been listening to younger users, who find that e-mail is too slow and formal, and are looking for something else. Oh, it will do e-mail, but it also handles Facebook regular and instant messaging. It’ll be woven into the fabric of Facebook, so you won’t have to leave the social networking site to get your e-mail, according to The Washington Post’s Melissa Bell. But even though the emphasis is on non-e-mail, everyone on the service will get a Facebook.com e-mail address. It’s what Facebook is calling the social inbox.
But is Facebook’s social inbox a Gmail killer? Hard to say. Around 350 million people are currently using Facebook messaging, sending 4 billion messages per year, quoted Geoffrey A. Fowler of The Wall Street Journal in a live blog of the event. An installed base that size would certainly be intimidating to Google or anyone else offering e-mail on that scale, especially given the stickiness of Facebook’s Web site. But it’s going to take a while; the system will be coming out over the next few months, so don’t hold your breath. Zuckerberg had some nice things to say about Gmail, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-DeVries. If you use the new Facebook service, you won’t have to give up your Gmail; the Facebook system is compatible with it.
It seems like an interesting platform, now we’ll just need to see how it works in practice. And of course, people will be bringing up Facebook’s bugbear, the privacy issue. But for now, we’re in a holding period until the full rollout.
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Filed under: TechStuff Tagged: e-mail, Facebook, gmail, messaging
