San Francisco (Obama.net)- It seems like it was just a few years ago that Facebook was just beginning to take off as a new social networking site. After a quick rise, the website slowly began to overtake the once ever-popular MySpace. Now, a few years after turning MySpace into an ancient social networking tool in the Internet world, Facebook is taking on a new competitor. After becoming one of the main ways people communicate online, Facebook is now looking to take over the entire world of electronic mail with their introduction of the “@facebook.com” email address.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told the world about the new Messages program that will give Facebook users an email address.
Zuckerman called the program “the way the future should work.”
The new program has three main aspects.
The first is seamless messaging. Facebook users will have the ability to communicate to their friends over SMS text messages, email, or instant messaging.
The second feature is conversation history. Users will have the ability to “see everything you’ve discussed with each friend as a single conversation.”
The third feature is set to be a social inbox where users can filter their messages so that the only ones that show up are the only ones they want to see.
Zuckerberg made it clear that “this is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it.”
Communication will be in real time and users can tie their Facebooks with their cell phones to stay connected on the go via email, text messages, and instant messaging.
Zuckerberg said on Facebook “You decide how you want to talk to your friends,” and that “they will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time.”
The new features will be slowly introduced into the Facebook over the course of the next few months. Users will be asked if they want to adopt an “@facebook.com” email address with their user names or not.
Programmers are arguing that the system is not intended to be an email replacement, but more of a sophisticated chat system.
Zuckerberg called the new program not email as well. The Facebook founder called email slow, but said that the revolutionary new program is informal, personal, short, seamless, immediate, minimal, and most of all, simple.
While the new program may not be designed to overtake email, people should recall that Facebook’s original goal was not to replace MySpace either.
The idea of getting rid of subjects is crazy, as is single-threading all conversations. I think everyone communicates on multiple subjects to the same people (talking with friend A about stock market AND also about that new project at work). Why would I want to combine different subjects into a single thread (hint: I wouldn’t).
I think I still with TrulyMail (and Hotmail) so I can keep things the way they are. This latest offering from Facebook reminds me of Google who tried to ‘help me’ by removing folders.
Please give me what I want, not what you think I want.
I’ll check it out when I can find it… Smile 🙂