Zuckerberg says that more than four billion messages are currently sent through Facebook each day. He also shared that Facebook believes that modern messaging is seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal. “It’s not e-mail,” he said.
Interestingly enough, Facebook is handing out facebook.com e-mail addresses to all users. The system, however, is really modeled after chat according to Andrew Bosworth. “People should share however they want to share,” he says.
The new messaging system is composed of three parts: seamless messaging, conversation history and the social inbox. The latter is an inbox for filtering the messages you want, organized by the people you care about. So, it’s designed to highlight conversations with
your real friends and be spam free.
The messaging system is also designed to be platform-agnostic, so users can send and receive messages via mobile, IM or Facebook. It’s designed to make it simpler for users to communicate in real-time with their real friends, wherever they are. The system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months in an invite-only process, says Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg also extensively talked about how people use messaging systems today. In conversations with high schoolers, Zuckerberg recounted that these youngsters told him that e-mail is too slow and that they prefer SMS and Facebook to sending e-mails. These conversations laid the foundation for the reasoning behind Facebook’s motivation to create a seamless, immediate and personal experience around messaging.
As soon as the event was announced last week, speculation ran rampant that Facebook would be overhauling their messaging system and releasing their own e-mail service to compete with the likes of Gmail. E-mail, however, seems to secondary to Facebook’s primary desire to be the communication platform for tomorrow’s youth.
More to come…
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