facebook email address announced | facebook mail, facebook email address, project titan, facebook titan, facebook email service

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facebook email address announced | facebook mail, facebook email address, project titan, facebook titan, facebook email service

At a Monday morning press conference in San Francisco, Facebook’s highly speculated upon email announcement finally had some light shed on it.

The gist of it: “This is NOT email.”

Well, it is and it isn’t.

“Whenever I get the chance to talk to high schoolers,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg began, “I always ask them what they’re using” to communicate with one another. But it was the type of messaging they weren’t using that caught Zuckerberg’s attention.

“‘We don’t really use email. It’s too slow,’ they told me.” Zuckerberg found the statement “completely boggling.”

Hence, the impetus behind Monday’s announcement of Facebook’s new Messaging system. In a nutshell, here’s what it entails:

Seamless Messaging – Users can send and respond to messages using different platforms, e.g. SMS text message, Instant Message/Chat, and yes, via the new Facebook email address users will be given. All of this occurs within the existing messaging center on a user’s page.

Conversation History – SMS, chat, email – ”All of these don’t work that well together as they exist right now,” Zuckerberg said, citing the complicated nature of keeping track of one’s communications over multiple platforms. As Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth (or ‘Boz,’ as he prefers) said, “Context is meaningful.” The new messaging system hyperthreads all of the correspondence between two parties – whether it be a user and another single user, or a user and an entire group of others. The idea, says Bosworth, “is to have one history,” not multiple. “Individually, these messages aren’t particularly profound,” Bosworth said. “But in conversation, in context, they’re meaningful.”

Social Inbox – Facebook separates a user’s inbox into three separate categories, which include those messages that are most important to you (“Messages”), those which are less so (“Others”), and the rest (“Junk”).

Beyond the nitty gritty, Zuckerberg and Bosworth threw out a lot of surprising stats. Here’s what we heard:

There are 350 million people actively using the messaging system on Facebook today.
More than 4 Billion messages are sent through the Facebook messaging system each day.

According to Zuckerberg, “the vast majority of these messages are one-to-one messages between users,” not listserv style.
“This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a new product – 15 engineers,” says Bosworth.
“The team has been working on this for well more than a year now,” says Zuckerberg. “15 months,” says Boz.
The growth of Facebook’s messaging service is “growing at a much faster rate” than Facebook’s user base, according to Zuckerberg.
“We’re giving people an @facebook.com email address,” says Bosworth. The address is entirely optional for users who wish to sign up.The initial system of launch is invite only to members of the press, and will be tested with user feedback over time to gauge how to expand.