It's More Than E-mail; Facebook Launches Modern Messaging System
Provides an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one.
Shipra Sharma | Delhi | November 16, 2010
Finally, Facebook has announced the launch of a new “Modern Messaging System” which is being termed as more than e-mail or e-mail killer.
Announcing the Modern Messaging System at a press event yesterday in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook, said, “Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message.”
Zuckerberg adds further, “We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”
Introducing the most interesting feature Social Inbox, Zuckerberg says, “It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into another folder where you can look at them separately.”
Simplifying on this, he continued, “If someone you know isn't on Facebook, that person's email will initially go into the other folder. You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there. You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and bounce any emails that aren't exclusively from friends.”
“This kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time. Messages reverses the approach to preventing unwanted contact. Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you,” added Zuckerberg.
Also read: Facebook To Launch Email Service Today