MoneyWatch Tech

Facebook Remakes Email -- and All Text Messaging -- In Its Own Image

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: November 15, 2010 / 3:35 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Many anticipated that Facebook would release its own email service today. And the company met those expectations and tried to go a lot further, making a bid to own communications among consumers, no matter how it takes place. And it did so in a way reminiscent of what Apple (AAPL) often does: take something that others -- including Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) have done, but put it together in a more compelling way.

The idea of pulling together different types of communications isn't new. So called "unified communication" has been a vendor category for years. Go into Yahoo email and you'll see which people on your Internet messaging chat list are also logged on. Or, for that matter, go into Yahoo IM and see what emails pop up. Gmail lets you chat or make telephone calls and Google tried to integrate Buzz, its social networking service (and received some strong backlash). Neither is Microsoft (MSFT) a stranger to connecting different forms of communication.

However, all of them have added different forms of communication over time and not presented them in a consistently coherent way. That's what Facebook has done in its announcement that emphasized the combination of SMS messaging, Facebook messages, IM, and email from a variety of different services, all integrated with conversation history and a social inbox. You have all forms of conversation in one place with accumulated history (and the accompanying gusher of profitable consumer information that is now all tied together instead of fragmented and out of reach).

Consumers won't need to use Facebook email or messaging. They can include any such service they want -- and that will make Google, in particular, apoplectic. Think the search giant didn't like giving up customer contact data to Facebook? Try large chunks of its email traffic.

Facebook plans to roll this out slowly, probably because the company had to rewrite its messaging infrastructure and an intelligent approach would be to test it slowly under real world conditions and only expand as it seems stable.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that younger generations increasingly use email less often because it's too formal, but I think there's a nuance that is missing. People will drift away from email if they spend more time in a given environment, like Facebook, and don't want to fire up a separate application to communicate.

Look at things that way and you realize the underlying principle: it's all text communications. Sometimes it's short and sometimes it's long. Sometimes it's a quick back-and-forth, and sometimes it needs to be more extensive with more time to react. In that sense, no, a modern messaging system won't be email any more than modern entertainment is just books or radio or television or movies. It will be a messaging environment that uses different delivery vehicles, as makes sense. And if the books are electronic or the TV programming comes in over a computer, so what?

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Image: Flickr user Public Domain Photos, CC 2.0.