Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer.
Facebook messaging has been the bane of users’ existence for years. My first public gripe was in 2008, when I said that urgent changes were needed. The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox.
But Facebook messaging is also only indirectly linked to the email, which is still the standard way that people exchange digital messages when not on Facebook.
Facebook has occasionally dabbled with improvements to messaging, like adding the ability to search messages. But for the most part it has remained static. And not very useful.
Even MySpace moved away from their aging messaging platform to a true webmail service in 2008 (albeit one that lacked POP or IMAP support).
But now Facebook is getting itself back in the game. And if the details we’ve heard are accurate, Project Titan, or whatever it’s called when it launches, may be the kind of product people flock to.
First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com.
Email is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect.
Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at. Gmail killer? I don’t think so. But a strong product move nonetheless.
Facebook is now trying to become Google now, after adding features from Friendfeed, Twitter etc
mail = more page views = more ads = $ for FB
No, no… Facebook is slowly becoming AOL.
Trust me on this one.
+1 • 10²³³²
It’s like I’m reliving the early 00s; it’s scary.
love the superscript comment.
I agree, an old school walled (closed) garden, ignoring the open standards many people have sweated blood to create so we have an interoperable internet.
Well, by making Facebook messaging a webmail service, they’re actually doing the opposite; unlike today’s messaging system, email is completely open. And since it supports POP and IMAP, you don’t even need to touch the website beyond signing up. (Assuming, of course, that part is true.)
Now of course it’s harder to switch services once you’ve started, but that’s a problem with any webmail service because your email address is tied to the service.
How many people do you think really use imap or pop that are on facebook? Out of my facebook friends, I’d say only about 10 use those features with their email clients. A little loss with ALOT of gain(more personal info in this case) is just good business.
Totally agree. Facebook has become the AOL of 12 years ago.
Hey, they do have Paul Bucheit at Facebook, right
Maybe he can create something better than his ‘Gmail’.
Does this mean I’ll get a sweet @facebook.com email? Cause this is useless to the entire web if not. Also, if so, then how would they roll this out. Sure you can use my profile name, but I humorously (and now unwisely) choose something that made no sense just to get rid of the notifications.
So, at the end of the day. Who cares. Great, they are reworking their messages. They should do that. It sucks. Secondly, I’ve never going to use them as my go-to email client. Ever. Never ever. End of story.
So, the TC hype machine continues. Great they’re upgrading their service that currently blows.
My guess is it will be @facemail.com haha
More like they’re trying to become AOL circa 1999
Facebook mail will fail… !
I wonder which will come first: a Facebook browser with no address bar or Facebook OS. One day all other websites/software will become redundant or obsolete.
I was going to say “What the crap is a facebook OS?” and I realized that I was skeptical when Apple said it had to sell 10 million of those iPhones first generation to break even on their investment. I was like…
I still have my doubts about the success of a “Facebook OS” though. I think I can live without facebook… maybe for a week.
Facebook OS? I don’t think we’ll be seeing it, even after a year or two. They can’t even manage their own privacy issues.
One thing that I would like to happen on FB though, is for them to have a simple “delete all” capability on the inbox. And perhaps, make their website secure from Koobface virus, that keeps on popping and popping at facebook every other month.
You mean this nasty virus? http://bit.ly/koobface-beta
hmm..sounds alot like the former “service” app that was AOL
I don’t think either, but it’s interesting to see them inch towards more infrastructure-like offerings. I just wrote a blog post casting dubious light on Gartner’s social web vs email predictions, and now here’s Facebook using embrace and extend tactics on email itself.
This is the mark of a serious software company, not a website. They want to be synonymous with the social web. With 400 million users, they’re well on their way for the consumer – and you can bet the enterprise will follow.
Wow. facebook smashing it once again. Facebooks a freighttrain eyeing up both microsoft and google. Good luck to both of them trying to stop the fb express.
I didn’t see TechCrunch writing about the new Hover over (Hovercards) feature in Twitter?
They’re frickin’ tooltips that have been araound for 10 years – not a feature.
Also, that’s not a question.
Quick, someone register http://www.facebook.com/webmaster vanity url!
Lol this has already been tried and isn’t available… you also can’t register any name that ends with .php and things like that…
The lead singer from my favorite band has a Aol.com email address. It garners much respekt.
And I know this as I was their ambassador when we had them on campus for a company event.
http://www.facebook.com/default.aspx worked though
They have a lot of catching up to do.
Unless they can offer users something better than Gmail, I don’t see them getting much traction.
It’s also unlikely that facebook will be taken seriously by any professional. It reminds me of the days when i would chuckle if i received an email from any user @aol.com
Surely you still laugh if you receive an email from any user @aol.com?
Its more of a whimper now.
Well I have to say I have been getting pretty disillusioned with gmail recently. It used to be great, but lately it’s been slow, lots of errors, and now I can’t view any images in my emails – even if I have expressly asked to view all images from a domain. I’m wondering if I’d have the same issues if I used Google Chrome as my browser??
yes, you would
well they did get Paul Bucheit from the FriendFeed acquisition…the guy created Gmail right?
I’d be happy if the new product let me add a new recipient to a message thread when replying, they’re very exclusive at the mo!
IMAP support sounds good. I will add it immediately to my Gmail
But I doubt that Facebook can be serious threat to Gmail. They are not showing so much guts to be open source as Gmail is. But as we all know, every strong open source project needs strong competition by some closed system. Like Apple / Microsoft or iPhone / Android.
It will be interesting battle to watch so I’m bringing my popcorns.
I recommend looking up the definition of Open Source. What you said doesn’t make sense as written.
yes, I will take a day off to do that
looks like you will need a couple of days at least. facebook is becoming by far more dominant than google. only tweats like you cant see it. 400 million users – from kids to seniors use it because their families use it too. everyone will be on facebook one day. but they will have to partner with other giants like microsoft etc to battle google on all levels. but on the main one – social web – google is loosing out big time. and who the fuck cares about walled garden? that’s in fact how we live in the REAL world. go get some facecorn for watching
)
Yea, the only thing you mentioned that’s open source is Android, the rest are closed platforms. Open source means the code that was used to create it, is, well, OPEN.
ok, maybe I didn’t express myself well but I was definitely thinking of Google Labs and the value which those plugins are bringing to Gmail. I don’t think that Facebook will go that far, but who knows
What in the world is open source about gmail?
It’s about user base and the ability to serve contextually relevant ads. It should be a good money maker for them.
>vanityurl@facebook.com
Good thing I didn’t get one. I see the spam flooding in the mailboxes. Can’t image it’ll have a functioning spam filter as Gmail does.
as far I understand, spam shouldn’t be a problem. In your privacy settings you can choose to receive only messages from your friends, friends of friends or from all. Quite cool actually.
I am thinking about the case where this is used as a regular email address. And it looks like that’s what Facebook is aiming at.
I understand. In that case spam filtering will be the key. Google nailed that quite good.
I frankly don’t want anyone sending me email in Facebook. Or MySpace. I have an email address already. 1 inbox is enough to keep track of.
Spam filtering, yes, huge! How will they deal with this? I get not-a-ONE spam message through Gmail.
About two spam messages per year get through to my GMail inbox. It’s so uncommon that it stuns me for a moment.
On the downside, legitimate email goes to my GMail spam folder a bit more often than I would like.
what in the world makes you think Google are the only ones capable of making a good spam filter, now and into the future?
Looks good .. But I dont think its gonna be gmail killer any soon …
Go Facebook! Social Search with Social Email – is that going to be LinkedIn killer?
Like the facebook new Interface, it’s very good
@Mike
You can prolly set up allow-lists. Like “only friends” etc.
Anyway, new mail seems very nice to me even if I wouldn’t want to use it. I wonder what happened to the XMPP chat.facebook.com service? Meebo still seems to connect using the XMPP gateway, but I wonder when Facebook officially launces the XMPP service.
Didn’t you guys also have an article about facebook allowing user profiles to publish updates to Twitter? That was supposed to happen in December.
In other words, I’ll believe this when I see it.
Bad for all email-companies who uses fbconnect…
I think this is big. People, especially the younger generation, have moved away from email (unpersonal, spammed) to IM in soc nets (personal, no spam). Facebook is trying to get app spam out of their platform by allowing app developers to send their messages via email –> more spam in your inbox, less spam in your facebook. E-Mail plus social graph is the killer app. Personal, relevant, rich, networked.
I think it’s the first step down a very interesting road – not so much the killer app as a signpost to the killer app.
It’s a shame it has to be so proprietary.
…and when they decide to give your account to some-one else you lose your email address…no thank-you.
Surely the main advantage of Facebook mail is that every message I get is from someone I’ve authorised?
And @sambensalem, would you take someone serious if they had a gmail address? I’d always look down on any professional that hasn’t got to the trouble of registering their own domain.
I was thinking the same thing. There’s a bigger problem here than Facebook has to solve before it’s email system will take off.
Email has the advantage that you can guarantee each email is completely private and only known to the sender and each recipient. It seems obvious, but the reason people have so much faith in this transparency is because the email system knows nothing else about you.
The perception with Facebook is not the same – and perception is much more important than reality. Users are unlikely to use Facebook mail for business use, formal use and shopping online if they fear that somehow the recipient is able to discern more about them from their Facebook identity.
I don’t think that is a legitimate fear, after all if contacts are not friends then they cannot see your details – however it is a fear that will lurk in everyone FB user’s mind. Do I want to send a mail to my landlord / future employer from the same “place” that I socalise at?
You make a good point.
However, you’re naive in thinking that email is private. When you send an email message to someone: a) it is not encrypted, b) it passes through multiple servers where a copy of the message is stored on each server that it passes, and c) the sender/recipient isn’t verified.
If you use secure mail, then yes it’s private, but most people do not, and they use the standard mail protocols which are not private by any means.
Is it going to be open to the public too? I mean, nothing is private anymore. : /
“The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails.”
They are *not* emails (yet)!
>The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox.
Whether you call them emails or not, there is a good solution for this with iMacros:
http://www.cynthiaperla.com/facebook/460/how-to-delete-all-groups-and-wall-posts-from-facebook-using-imacros.html
Look at it this way, a user could start and continue a threaded FB message from their email client. Bringing the FB internal environment to a global ubiquitous platform.
Will be interesting to keep an eye on. But I won’t be adding my FB email address to my CV.
It’s about time. I haven’t used personal email for years for communicating with my friends.
Email will be a thing of the past. Digital communications is migrating onto social networks where there is context for the communication. Either big networks like Facebook and LinkedIn or small niche networks as well.
I hope LinkedIn does the same. They’ve made massive improvements in their functionality with groups (which killed Yahoo! Groups), their apps, their ability to store Contact information, etc.
I would be very happy if all my personal communication was in Facebook and all my professional communication was on LinkedIn.
Marsh Sutherland
http://socialgrow.com
@socialgrow | @marshsutherland
If the reality would look like that, messaging happening only inside networks, I’d invite email to get the emails all in one place. Who wants to head over to x website to communicate? I hate getting messages all over on the different platforms.
LOL. You’re delusional if you think that LinkedIn of all things killed Yahoo Groups. That’s completely ridiculous.
I’d also have to say you clearly don’t value your privacy. Even Gmail is a lot more private than Facebook or LinkedIn. Why would I want Amazon or Best Buy want to know ANYTHING about my friends or family just because I buy something from their online store?
with facebook ids… very less ppl can access their email ids in office…
…Access Blocked…
Company emails will have filters for facebook ids…
Looks like they attack also at the Search Business..
Good to see Microsoft has finally found an OEM platform for their ageing Exchange Platform. Having a 10% stake in the company means I seriously doubt they’ll let FB take on LIVE – just reuse it.
Well, at least I would expect to see FB on Win 2008 server soon…
M$ owns 1.6% of FB.
Sounds like a logical step, although I shudder to think how many issues they’ll have with this.
I mean, let’s be honest, so far Facebook haven’t been able to create a stable platform for their core business (ie. Social Network)… are they really going to be able to get email to work properly?
This reminds me of an old blog post that i had written. It was titled “Emails are outdated.”
http://suprajarama.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/emails-are-now-outdated/
Not. Emails are still very much alive and kicking, and will continue to exist in some form though they may have evolved and become known like a ‘message queue’ or a ‘buffered message’ system. There is simply no substitute for a form of communication that does not demand real-time attention, that you can attend to sequentially as time permits. Read PBS article ‘email is far from dead’ here – http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/02/email-is-far-from-dead033.html. That said, facebook launching email to go along with your social presence is a cool idea. Facebook is seen pioneering the merging of email inbox and social media messaging dashboards conceptually.
“There is simply no substitute for a form of communication that does not demand real-time attention, that you can attend to sequentially as time permits.”
I see Google Wave as a possible substitute in that it offers both real time and standby. But you are right, email is nowhere close to being dead. Businesses still use it heavily and we’re prob not switching to social network mail any time soon.
“How many email greetings have you sent to your loved ones. Or how many queries have you emailed to your co-worker. On the other hand, you make it more personalised by sending a greeting on Orkut or Facebook, or you quickly log on to the instant messenger to type your query to be sent to your colleague. ”
Wow, we live in different worlds. I definitely opt 80+% of the time for email. I also abhor Facebook messages; it is so difficult to respond to them compared to email (esp. from a mobile device).
Everything on the web exists because of email. It’s the only way to identify oneself. For example, you can’t open up a Facebook account without an email address.
So, email will likely never go away.
If E-mail Id is same as the Vanity URL wouldn’t E-Mail Id become too very public..? Spamming could become a major problem here coz every one will know “who is who”, which could lead to v well targeted spamming.
This should be available tomorrow then right as Paul Buchheit built GMail in a day?! Can’t wait
I’m curious how identity reputation management companies look at Facebook these days…