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Social network website plans to combine text messages, emails and instant messages all in one place online
From the decline in affection of one relationship to the growing warmth of another, Facebook users will soon be able to chart their entire conversation history with friends, family and lovers using the company's new communication system.
The social network website plans to combine text messages, emails and instant messages all in one place online.
Today, at an eagerly awaited presentation at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the site which now has 500 million users, unveiled the details of a product which some in the industry had been classing a "Gmail killer", referring to Google's email offering.
Zuckerberg, speaking to an assembled group of journalists, talked quickly but coherently as he revealed the philosophy behind the system.
He was especially keen to stress one point. "It's not email," he said early in his presentation. "It's true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email."
The new service, which will be called Facebook Messages, will offer a social inbox and "seamless messaging", a clearly excited Zuckerberg said.
What that means is that if users so wish the company will now begin to compile their chatter from across four platforms: text messages, instant messages (IMs), emails and messages sent on Facebook.
The Facebook chief executive said that, in addition to the benefit of the software pooling messages from different devices, another boon would come as Facebook Messages provided the ultimate in spam and message filtering – a feat that existing email services have never fully accomplished, he suggested. "There are a lot of different classes of junk, and it's really difficult for any email system to know [that] 'this is a person who is sending me a legitimate message but you just don't care about what they have to say'," he said, displaying a glimpse of the social awareness – or lack of – for which he is famed.
Facebook Messages will prevent communiques from the unwanted, Zuckerberg continued, as users would be able to alter their settings in a manner similar to the current Facebook privacy settings, allowing messages through from "Friends only" or "Friends of Friends". Conversation histories going back years would be saved into users' accounts and spam filtered out, he claimed.
Demonstrating the new tool – after making his own, apparently obligatory, "it's not email" preface – Facebook's director of engineering, Andrew Bosworth, pulled up his personal chat history with his girlfriend, saying that he was really jealous that the "next generation" would be able to see their entire conversation history with their own partner or friends.
Whether this next generation will want to see every single utterance they have ever exchanged with their incumbent is a different matter – one can imagine good reason for not recording some heat-of-the-moment remarks for all eternity.
Questioned on the wisdom of total documentation Bosworth stressed that users of the service would be able to delete conversations.
So will Facebook Messages be the future of communication, or will it be the next Google wave?
The latter was another development much heralded at the time as a way to unify communication on the web. It was released in May 2009 and quietly disbanded in August this year.
"The key for Facebook's success with messaging will be to get the privacy settings right the first time," was the snap reaction of Michael Gartenberg, consumer specialist at the technology analysis company Gartner. Ironically he provided his view on Twitter.
Only time will tell how successful the ubiquitous social networking site's latest development proves to be.
For the time being, just remember not to call it email.
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