Email will be Dead, said by Mark Zuckerberg CEO Facebook

Email is dead, or will be dead. That's the underlying message of CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he unveiled Facebook's revamped messaging system in San Fracisco on Monday night. The popular networking service was supposed to launch a "Gmail killer" at the much-hyped event. But it was far from it. Nevertheless, the new avataar will raise network communication to a level that will shake the Gmails and Yahoos.

Zuckerberg himself painted the picture thus: "I don't expect people to wake up tomorrow and say, 'I'm going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account'...Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out people will start to say this is how the future should work."

One of the biggest improvisations is that Facebook users will be able to communicate to non-Facebook users via Facebook using an @facebook.com ID. This is a possible threat to email services as now Facebook users will have to go to Hotmail or Yahoo or Gmail to communicate with non-Facebook users. So, at least theoretically, there's a possibility of a good number of Facebook users gradually making @facebook.com their default email ID.

Secondly, Zuckerberg foresees an era when email will not be the only means of communication between two people. A Pew study shows that text messaging is the most preferred means of communication for US teens, very few used email. He said 350 million members (out of over 500 million members) use Facebook's messaging system. So Facebook decided to take it a step ahead, by bringing emails, SMS, instant messages besides Facebook messages on one platform. Andrew Bosworth, a software engineer at Facebook, said, "People should share however they want to share...If you want to send me an email and I want to get it in a text message, that should work. So, all the communication -- whether it be via SMS, IM, email or Facebook messages -- will be in the user's 'Social Inbox'".

AOL, which is in the process of revamping its email, differed with this forecast of death of emails. Its senior vice-president of consumer products Brad Garlinghouse told the BBC that email remained one of the killer apps on the internet. But hours after the Facebook announcement, Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Web 2.0 summit, welcomed the new competition. "More competition is always good because competition makes the market larger," he said. "It brings more people in. We are all served by having everybody in the world get online."

Facebook will bury traditional email 'subject' line, the cc and bcc. It envisages a seamless conversation between two people across any mode of communication.

Facebook’s latest evolution of Messages ties in multiple forms of communication–SMS, IMs, email–from Facebook and other platforms to allow users to communicate in real-time, on-the-go through whichever messaging tool they prefer. “You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time,” Facebook wrote in a blog post

Source : The Times of India