Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the "future of modern messaging" by launching a service that brings your email, IMs, Facebook messages and texts into one seamless portal.
The service, which could potentially change the way we think about email, will allow users to view communications from all devices in one conversation history for each of your friends.
In theory, the new messaging service previously known as Project Titan, will allow our every technological correspondence to take place, and be recorded, on Facebook.
The company will also offer each of its 500m users an @facebook.com email address based on their profile name, but insists the new service is not based around email.
Conversation history
Zuckerberg says the multiple thread model used by Gmail is "archaic" and that the new service will provide a "full, rich history with each of your friends" that is one continuous conversation across many platforms.
The example used at the media event was the ability to chronicle an entire relationship history "from 'hi, nice to meet you', to 'hey it's your turn to pick up the kids from soccer practice tonight,'" pulling together emails, texts and IMs.
Another aspect of the new service is called Social Inbox, which ensures that users only see messages that they care about, while doing a better job than a spam filter of blocking out unwanted content by giving users greater control over who they receive messages from.
Not an email killer
Zuckerberg says the service isn't an email killer, but a new messaging service of which email is a part. He reckons it represents a seismic shift from email to simpler, more informal services like Facebook chat.
The service will be rolled out to users, slowly, over the next few months.The bottom line is that we're probably going to be spending much more of our time on Facebook.
