Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg yesterday launched a messaging service he claimed would change the way people communicated in the future.
Launching the new service in San Francisco, Mr Zuckerberg said email was too slow and formal and would eventually follow the letter into extinction.
His social networking site's new messaging service would integrate all web and text-based communications and worked instantaneously, he said at a briefing.
Many analysts regard the Facebook service as a direct rival to Google's Gmail, but Yahoo and Microsoft will be also be under threat as many of the 500 million Facebook users take up the new messaging service.
Facebook users will have access to an @facebook.com email address if they wanted it, and Mr Zuckerberg said entire conversation histories going back years would also be saved in users' accounts and spam would be filtered out.
"We don't think that a modern messaging system is going to be email.
We want people to be able to communicate in whatever way they choose - email, text or Facebook message," the billionaire 26-year-old said.
At the heart of it all was the "social inbox" where messages - again not just email - were housed and filtered.
Because Facebook already knew who your friends were, it could filter messages that it believed to be important to you, Sam Diaz blogged on ZDNet.
Everything else, not necessarily junk but maybe a newsletter, a bank statement or something from a family member who was not on Facebook, went into an "other" folder.
"In terms of the seamless integration that Zuckerberg and team talked about, the idea is that users should be able to have an IM appear as an SMS or an SMS appear as an email, giving people a way to use the communication tool they prefer without worrying about how the recipient will see it or respond to it.
That can be pretty powerful," he said.
Facebook said the rollout to users would be a slow one, over the next couple of months.
Initially, it would be spread via invitations.
The idea was to let people get used to it and offer some feedback to Facebook about it.
Mr Zuckerberg stressed no-one at Facebook was expecting users to dump their Gmail or Yahoo accounts any time soon.
But he acknowledged he hoped people would gravitate to Facebook's messaging service over the next several years.
Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are already scrambling to retool their email services to build them more around people's social connections - with mixed results.
Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said that the new service represented a threat to both Google and Yahoo's email platforms.
"Longer term, we think Google's Gmail and Yahoo Mail could have more difficulty attracting new users," he said.
