PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than two decades, e-mail has been the killer application of the Internet. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, believes that e-mail is antiquated.
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a new unified messaging system on Facebook that allows people to communicate with each other regardless of whether they are using e-mail, text messages or online chat services.
“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He said that e-mail is too formal, too slow and too cumbersome, especially for young people who have grown up communicating using online chat and text messaging systems. The new Facebook service, which will allow users to have @facebook.com e-mail addresses, intends to integrate the three forms of communication into one inbox that is accessible from PCs or mobile phones.
Mr. Zuckerberg played down any suggestion that the new service would revolutionize communications overnight.
“This is not an e-mail-killer,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say they are going to shut down” their current e-mail accounts.
Still, analysts said that over time the service could gradually become a replacement
“All of the e-mail vendors should be worried – Google, Yahoo, MSN,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, in an interview Friday, before the Facebook service was unveiled. “All of those platforms have been trying to add social networking features to their services.”
The new system will also include social features that allow users to filter their in-box in a way that prioritizes messages from friends and close associates over others. And it offers a way to quickly access all the conversations they’ve had with a particular user.
The system will be rolled out gradually over the next few months, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“It sounds great.,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, an industry blog. “I want to see how it works in practice.”
via nytimes.com