Waving at Google
Facebook announced a new messaging product via a live-streamed press event a few minutes ago. It isn't Facebook email and it hasn't been given a shiny new name, rather it's being positioned as an evolution of Messages.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the lead and explained that, while everyone with a Facebook account will be entitled to an @facebook.com email address, the system is "definitely not email". He was at pains to stress that this isn't an ‘email killer' and is not even limited to facebook.com, rather it's an attempt to unify all written communications: SMS, email, IM and Facebook messaging.
It looks like it it could more accurately be called a ‘Google Wave killer' if Google hadn't done such a great job of killing it itself. While Zuckerberg stressed the compatibility of this system with various other products - including Gmail - his ambition is clearly for it to be the default written messaging product for both PCs and mobile devices.
The three cardinal objectives for this product - for which Facebook assembled its largest ever team for a product launch (15 engineers) - are as follows:
1. Seamless messaging
2. Conversation history
3. The social inbox
There is integration with SMS, as well as a special iPhone app launched today, so that people can get your messages ‘pushed' to their mobile devices. There are some unique tools available, such as the ability to block incoming messages from anyone who isn't a ‘friend', and to be able to tell whether messages are from friends or not.
The service will be rolled-out slowly over the next few months. We don't know whether we'll qualify for an early invite by virtue of being in on the webcast, but we'll just have to try and cope until it arrives.
