Facebook: The New E-Mail?

Through my random travels around the interweb today I stumbled across this little tid-bit of information, on, wait for it... Yahoo News (I know, I'm just as shocked as you, turns out that yahoo was actually good for something!).

So it seems that CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is hoping that the new technology he is planning to bring out for the popular social networking site is going to overtake the ancient (in digital time anyway) system that is email.

Right now their message box system looks, and acts much like your common hotmail or gmail account. However over the next few months it looks like Facebook will begin launching its new shiny and sparkly just-out-of-its-box way of doing things, which, apparently incorporates phone texts, IM chats and e-mails from non-Facebook accounts.

And what makes the guys over at FB Headquarters so confident that this will work? The “social graph” they have of all their users. Using this technology they'll be able to filter out messages from strangers and even our

chatterbox friends, by sorting them into a separate, less important box.

Another appealing aspect of this system? If you prefer getting texts, you'll get texts, if it'd emails you like than emails it shall be!

Yet, as much as this new messaging system may resemble e-mail, it isn't!

No Cc fields, and no subject lines. They seem to be stripping it all back to it's basics and even describe it as “this generation's equivalent of a box filled with years of love letters.”

But of course the other big email providers aren't exactly happy about this as it may steal away some of their users. Microsoft Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo are afraid that this new service will “nibble” away at them.

Personally I just think they're jealous, Facebook threatens to make them obsolete and there isn't anything they can do about it. Whereas Google seems to think this is great, with their CAO stating: "More competition is always good because competition makes the market larger...We are all well served by having everybody online."

And of course it isn't all roses, with an increased use of Facebook, and less reasons to use other services, more and more information will be shared, creating a greater security risk when it comes to privacy.

This increased risk has even been called “deeply disturbing” by a privacy watchdog group.

In fact google learned this the hard way when they attempted to merge their email service gmail with a social aspect in what they called “Buzz”. Unfortunatly for Google it was poorly designed and their users mistakenly opened up their emails for the world to see! And that then led to a lawsuit.

So will Facebook fall into the same trap? Or can they improve the design and layout to make it more user friendly?

We all know already that Facebook isn't as private as we would like it to be.

By adding apps we are inadvertenly giving permission for own personal information to be viewed by others, and many people aren't aware of using proper privacey settings.

This “box of love letters” could very well fall into the wrong hands and be read by people we would much prefer hadn't seen a thing.

If the people over at HQ can get that sorted out however it looks like a solid investment, that could very well revolutionise the way we send our mail.

So some people think it will fail, others think it's going to be the next big thing, but I guess we wont know for another few months at least, until it gets released.

Till then why don't you read all about it HERE and decide for yourself.