Social networking giant Facebook unveiled Monday a new messaging system designed to integrate several electronic communications products — including email and text messaging — into one user-friendly, web-based service.
“It’s not email,” CEO Mark Zuckererg said at his company’s “special event” held at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, but users will have the option to use email addresses that end in “@facebook.com.”
Zuckerberg said the system — intended to reflect users’ preferences for “simpler real-time communication” — will be built around three major ideas: seamless messaging, to integrate all electronic communications each user sends and receives; conversation history, to easily group communications; and a “social inbox” that allows users to separate priority messages from other messages.
“The goal of the product,” Zuckerberg said, “is to seamlessly integrate all these products,” including emails, Facebook messages and text messages. “The future of communication is not email.”
Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s director of engineering added that all users will have the ability to receive an email address that ends in “@facebook.com.”
“This is an option,” he said. “If you choose not to get it, everything still works fine.”
“The system is definitely not email, ” Bosworth added. “We’ve modeled it more after chat.”
Ahead of Monday’s launch, many technology analysts had said the new system would be designed to compete against Google’s Gmail product — bloggers even referred to the rumored system as the “Gmail killer.”
Responding to those allegations, Zuckerberg said, “this is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it.”
“We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘OK I’m going to shut down my Yahoo email or my Gmail account,” he added.
The system will be rolled out over the next few months, Zuckerberg said, adding that users will only be able to gain access by invitation.