Last night Facebook announced plans to roll out a new messaging system that will seamlessly connect all text-based communications. But what does it mean for the way we talk to our nearest and dearest and will it lead to the death of email?
For the past week there’s been a great deal of speculation about what Facebook’s next steps will be. After the Places announcement in August and the added Groups functionality in October, the powerful social network is clearly trying to become an even more integral part of our lives both online and offline.
Yesterday, Facebook made its latest, highly-anticipated announcement and many of the rumours circulating beforehand turned out to be true. The Facebook team has created a new email system… Well, kind of.
After the new system was dubbed a ‘Gmail killer’ by technology press late last week, Mark Zuckerberg was keen to reiterate that the latest development isn’t an email service, instead it’s a kind of ‘modern messaging system’.
According to the team, it’s a seamless messaging system which will bring together text messaging, instant chat, email, Facebook chat and Facebook messaging, regardless of which platform or device people prefer to use.
Facebook’s director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth, said that many conversations are now so fragmented and Facebook’s latest product will act as a way of bringing them all together. All the different kinds of text-based chat will now appear in one continuous stream, regardless of whether it’s an email or an instant message.
Facebook has come up against countless privacy issues in the past, however, it seems as if users will have plenty of control over their messages. Settings can be changed so that users decide who can send them messages and there’ll be separate folders for different kinds of contacts and conversations.
Although the Facebook team nervously laughed off the suggestion that this latest development will lead to the death of email, Zuckerberg did suggest that in the next few years people may move from emails to something much more simple and streamlined.
Unsurprisingly, the latest announcement has been greeted with equal measures of praise and criticism. I’m undecided about whether I’ll actively use the service, but I don’t think we can criticise it until it’s up and running.
Facebook’s new messaging service, what do you need to know:
1. Initially it will be an invite only system so that Facebook can gradually introduce it and make necessary changes if anything goes wrong or if any of the first users have suggestions.
2. The Facebook team hope to have the service rolled out across the whole platform in the next few months.
3. Your email address will be yourname@facebook.com. If you have a vanity url that will become the yourname bit and those that don’t may have to chose one.
4. There will be opt-out functionality, so if you’re not interested you can go back to using Facebook like you always have.
5. The team were so conscious not to call it email but expect standard email functionality, the ability to delete threads, group emails and forwarding.
Becca Caddy is a BitchBuzz Tech columnist and freelance writer for Reputation Online, New Media Age’s spin-off publication. You can follow her on Twitter @beccacaddy.
Photo from Brian Solis’ Flickr