Facebook’s new messaging service promises ‘death of email’

LONDON - Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social networking giant Facebook, has said that email would fade out, just like the letter did, as it is slow and informal.

The 26-year-old made the claim as he launched the Facebook’s new messaging service, which integrates all web and text-based communications and works instantaneously.

The service, perceived as a direct rival to Google’s Gmail, marks a new front in the ongoing and increasingly bitter battle between Facebook and Google to gain the loyalty of users.

Zuckerberg revealed that, as rumoured, the 500million people signed up to Facebook would have access to a ‘Facebook.com’ email address.

Entire conversation histories going back years will also be saved into users’ accounts and Spam will be completely filtered out, he claimed.

“We don’t think that a modern messaging system is going to be email,” the Daily Mail quoted Zuckerberg, as saying at a press conference in San Francisco.

“We want people to be able to communicate in whatever way they choose: email, text or Facebook message,” he said.

Facebook’s new email system is modelled on instant messaging and on-line chat and will allow people to simplify their communications regardless of how they choose to do it.

Texts, email or instant messages will all come into one ‘feed’ and users can respond in any way they want.

Zuckerberg said that he was changing Facebook because young people found email was too much of a ‘cognitive load’.

He said of the new programme: “It’s not email. It handles email… along with all the different ways you want to communicate.”

“The goal of this product is to make it that we can seamlessly integrate across all of these different products very easily,” he added. (ANI)