Facebook Introduces 'Modern Day Messaging Product'
Facebook insists 'Project Titan' is not an e-mail killer -- or Gmail killer -- but the social networking company's new unified messaging platform, also known as Messages, will include a new @Facebook.com e-mail domain and also replicate some of the functionality already offered by Google's e-mail service.
"This is not an e-mail killer," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "This is a messaging system that includes e-mail as one part of it. We don't expect anyone to shut down Yahoo! Mail and switch exclusively to Facebook."
Instead, Facebook is positioning its new and improved Messages platform as a tool that can aggregate and organize external messaging services and communications into one easy-to-use hub on the social networking site.
Joel Seligstein, a Facebook software engineer, wrote on the official Facebook Blog that the Messages system allows users to talk to friends via short message service, chat, e-mail or Facebook. "They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time," Seligstein wrote. "You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."
Zuckerberg said the development team worked on Project Titan for more than a year and that the team's ultimate goal was to try to get a handle on the enormous growth of messages, with different types of content and various disparate standards. The Messages platform will include features like a "social inbox" that will sort communications from friends from other types of messages, such as billing statements, newsletters, and other non-personal communications.
The company will be rolling out Project Titan "pretty slowly" over the next few months with invites going out to select Facebook members, Zuckerberg said.
Ironically, just days before Facebook introduced Messages, the company lost Paul Buchheit, a noted software engineer who developed Google's Gmail and then later left Google to form startup FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook last year. Buchheit left Facebook last week to join venture capital firm Y Combinator. It's unclear how much, if any, development Buchheit may have contributed to Facebook Messages.