At a press conference in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is set to launch a new “modern messaging system.”
Zuckerberg says more than four billion messages are currently sent through Facebook every day. He stated that Facebook believes that modern messaging is seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal. “It’s not e-mail,” says Zuckerberg.
Yet, it might be strange but, Facebook is handing out Facebook.com email addresses to all users. This modern messaging system intends to integrate e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and texting in a unified inbox.
The system is composed of three parts: seamless messaging, cross platform conversation history, and the social inbox. But really, there are two inboxes -– one for filtering messages you want and organizing the people you care about, and the second, called “Others,” is mostly meant for messages sent to you by specific events or Facebook pages. It’s designed to highlight conversations with your real friends and be spam free.
The messaging system is also designed to be platform-agnostic, so users can send and receive messages from mobile, IM or Facebook. It’s developed to make it easier to communicate in real-time with friends, whenever or wherever they might be. According to Zuckerberg, the system is currently being tested and will be unveiled slowly over the next few months in an invite-only process.
Zuckerberg discussed how people use messaging systems today, and recounted conversations with high school students who told him e-mail is “too slow,” and that they prefer SMS and Facebook to sending e-mails. These conversations helped prompt Facebook’s decision to create this new development.
This “modern messaging system” can be great for businesses that require teamwork on projects, or even for just communicating with a co-worker or friend. This could certainly benefit a company like us here at Chico Web Design – the IM and email it offers would allow us an all-in-one messaging system, instead of using the two separately with two different logins. Facebook’s new system can save time in switching between e-mail and IM by seamlessly combining the two.
After Facebook announced the launch of its new messaging system, speculations ran high that Facebook would be overhauling its entire system and releasing its own e-mail service to compete with the likes of Gmail. However, so far e-mail seems to be secondary to Facebook’s primary aspirations of being the communication platform for tomorrow’s youth.
