The death of email? Not so fast…
Facebook has finally unveiled ‘Project Titan’ – its ‘next generation of email’. With a bold claim that the service will mark the death of traditional email, the social network’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched the all-encompassing messaging service.
Speaking at an event in San Francisco this week, Zuckerberg said: “Email is too slow… email is too formal.” According to the chief executive, Facebook’s new service will feature a combination of instant messaging, SMS, Facebook messages and email in one place, allowing users to ‘chat’ seamlessly across multiple devices to different types of messages.
However, Zuckerberg emphasised that the new email system is not all about email. It is more about seamless messaging, a ‘social inbox’ that prioritises key contact’s messages (whether you get to decide who your key contacts are is another question) and shows all conversation history in one screen shot, regardless of where the ‘chat’ took place.
Sounds fairly confusing doesn’t it? Charles Arthur certainly thinks so. “Did you go ‘uh?’ when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new email system isn’t email? Don’t worry – so did everyone else,” he wrote in yesterday’s Guardian.
Arthur says Facebook’s plans are “technology’s equivalent of the Schleswig- Holstein Question: only three people understand it, and one is mad and another is dead”… only, Zuckerberg’s not dead. He understands the concept – “a huge, horrendously long, never-ending email” – but wonders how the social network will pull it off, given that no-one else has ever managed to.
It is still in a semi-testing phase, with invite-only access at the moment. However, Zuckerberg has promised it will be rolled out across the next several months. And in the future, he believes the system will be able to sync with other email accounts. Although this system has taken 15 programmers more than a year to develop, and it is still not 100%, according to Arthur, who says: “If Zuckerberg has solved this problem, we’ll all cheer – though if it means we all have to live inside Facebook.com, maybe not.”
By contrast, Tom Scott thinks it is “safe to assume that Facebook Mail is being switched on in the very near future”. However, Scott wonders if the hype around the mysterious ‘Project Titan’ was worthy of all the attention: “Facebook Mail will be neither a swift revolution nor a privacy disaster. It’ll just be another incremental improvement – but perhaps also a step change – in one of many social networks, and another small step forward for our online lives.”