Facebook Messages: Social Networking in your Inbox or on your Phone

Facebook—and their half a billion users—is getting ready to launch a challenge to the webmail market by offering a unified communications service linked to an e-mail account.

The firm's youthful director, Mark Zuckerberg, was careful to begin this week's press conference by pointing out that his new 'Messages' service isn't a 'Gmail killer'.  That's true enough: the new direction for Facebook could actually make the gap between the two services even bigger.  Google has had a few problems making tools that respond to users' desire for a 'social' web, and the spectacular flop Google Buzz is just one example.

Despite Zuckerberg's reassuring words, which were designed to ease the tension between the two web giants, Facebook will in future have a real inbox—an improvement on the current offering—that will be able to filter incoming messages to weed out spam, 'other' messages, and those coming from your friends or friends of your friends.

The system isn't much like a real e-mail account—here, e-mail is more of an add-on to existing Facebook services—but it's also possible to see it as an attempt to extend the firm's reach beyond the limits of the site itself.  Zuckerberg can claim that it's not designed to tread on Google's toes as much as he likes, but it's clear that the new service will join the online communication fray, offering young users yet more instant gratification.

A unified inbox: straight to the point

For users of the new service, the choice of how to communicate with their friends—by text message, e-mail or IM—will become totally transparent.  Facebook members will be able to send messages without necessarily specifying the best way for them to reach their recipient immediately: the network will choose the fastest way to get the message there.  In the future, there will be no reason not to start a conversation by e-mail and continue it over Facebook chat—with all of your previous exchanges on the subject immediately available.  Messages promises to centralise all of your communications in a single location.

Although the new system will work with other e-mail providers, Facebook will also offer a new @facebook.com address to anybody that wants one.  The new addresses will allow it to gather even more information about its users, as well, of course, as their contacts, whether they're signed up or not.  It strikes us a very cost-effective way of doing publicity.  For the time being, the service is only available by invitation.  The beta phase will allow Facebook's engineers to make the necessary tweaks before access to Messages is opened to everybody.

Facebook takes up 10% of Internet users' time

You might remember that Google has recently started banning Facebook from gaining automatic access to the contacts in users' Gmail accounts.  That's not necessarily the worst ever news for the world's most popular social networking site, though, as much of its strength lies elsewehere.

In November last year, analysts Comscore reported that the site occupied around 5% of the time spent online by Internet users.  In the space of a year, that figure has doubled, and Facebook is now ahead of all of Google's sites put together, including the corse services plus YouTube and Picasa.  At the same time, advertisers spent more with Facebook than they did Yahoo!.  Although Gmail, the second biggest webmail service in the US (behind Microsoft's Hotmal) took 11% of advertising revenue, Facebook sucked up a huge 23% of advertisers' dollars.  Google is still much-loved on Wall Street, where its estimated value is 193 billion dollars; poor old Facebook is 'only' worth 41 billion.

Facebook has both the ambition and the tools it needs to succeed, and plenty of web users are willing to back it.  Its fairytale success story is no doubt part of the reason why a tenth of its employees used to work for ... you guessed it, Google.  Zuckerberg's baby just keeps on growing and its growing army of loyal users seem willing to help it achieve his aim: creating a whole new web inside the web.


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