SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook trotted out an all-in-one messaging tool on Monday that pools users' email, instant and text messages, taking on Google Inc's and Yahoo Inc's popular email platforms.
Addressing speculation the world's largest social networking site was planning a "Gmail-killer," Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the new system will let users own "facebook.com" addresses, but stressed it did not stop at email.
It also lets users send instant and text messages in addition to standard email and Facebook notes, he said.
"This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it," Zuckerberg told reporters at the swanky St. Regis hotel.
Zuckerberg, who said more than 350 million of Facebook's half-billion users now actively send and receive messages on his website, did not see communications being email-based in future.
While people will not stop using email immediately, more and more will shift to an integrated, cross-platform mode of communications such as Facebook, Zuckerberg argued.
More than 4 billion messages get sent everyday through Facebook. Its new messaging platform will incorporate a number of features, including an inbox devoted to a user's friends and contacts on Facebook, and another for other mail and messages.
Facebook and Google's intensifying rivalry is expected to play a crucial role in shaping the future of the Internet. The industry is closely watching their pitched struggle for Web surfers' time online, advertising dollars, and increasingly costly Silicon Valley talent.
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Google bars data from Facebook as rivalry heats up
By Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters
Posted at 11/06/2010 5:56 PM | Updated as of 11/09/2010 3:20 PM
SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users' information, highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.
Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.
Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google's Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.
In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook "leave users in a data dead end." Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.
While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users' ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world's largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.
"The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that."
"If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google's properties."
Reciprocity
Google said that while it makes it easy for other Web services to automatically import a user's contact data, Facebook was not reciprocating.
"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," Google said in an emailed statement.
"We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites," Google said.
Some technology blogs were reporting that Facebook still appeared to be allowing users to import their Google Gmail contacts into Facebook as of mid-day Friday.
A Google spokesman told Reuters that the company had begun enforcing the new rules "gradually."
Google also stressed that users will still be able to manually download their contacts to their computers in "an open, machine-readable format" which can then be imported into any Web service.
Google has coveted the wealth of information that Facebook's half-billion users generate and amass. Having access to that data could be especially valuable to Google, whose business model is based on allowing its users to find any information anywhere on the Web.
"Google is trying to use the leverage that it has to get as much access to the Facebook social graph (network of friends and interests) that it can, so it can provide the best search function that it can," said Wedbush Securities analyst Lou Kerner. "The more data Google has access to the better its search results are going to be."
Last month, Facebook announced a deal with Microsoft Corp allowing Facebook information -- such as Web pages that Facebook users have endorsed by clicking on "like" buttons -- to appear within Microsoft search results.
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in September the company would add social "layers" to many of its existing Web products in the coming months, following its less-than-stellar track record of developing stand-alone social networking products like Orkut and the recently shuttered Wave service.
Google also has acquired a slew of small social networking companies in recent months, including Slide and social payment company Jambool.
Gartner's Valdes said access to the explosion of new types of data generated by Web services, such as location-based services, would provide further flashpoints between Google and Facebook.
"It's one skirmish among many to come," said Valdes.
Google's shares closed Friday's regular session down 81 cents at $625.08.
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WASHINGTON - Facebook, rumored for some time to be planning its own email service, may finally be on the verge of doing so in a move that would send a shot across the bow of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
TechCrunch, a leading Silicon Valley technology blog, reported Friday that the social network plans to announce a Web-based email service complete with @facebook.com addresses at an event in San Francisco on Monday.
Agence France-Presse and other media outlets have been invited to Facebook's event but have not been told what it will be about.
Facebook boasts more than 500 million members around the world and offering a personal email service would lay down a powerful challenge to the established email giants -- Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google's Gmail.
Hotmail currently has the most users, 361.7 million as of September, according to online tracking firm comScore, followed by Yahoo! with 273.1 million and Gmail with 193.3 million.
TechCrunch said Facebook's planned Web-based email service is part of a secret project known as "Project Titan" that is "unofficially referred to internally as its 'Gmail killer.'"
"And while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there's a huge amount of potential here," TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid noted.
The report comes amid a recent bout of sparring between Facebook and Google over data sharing and Silicon Valley engineering talent.
Google last week blocked Facebook from importing Gmail contact information over the Palo Alto, California-based social network's refusal to reciprocate and share data about its users.
And The Wall Street Journal reported that Internet search king Google, in a bid to stem defections to rival technology firms such as Facebook, has given all of its 23,000 employees a 10% pay hike.
According to the Journal, roughly 10% of Facebook's employees are Google veterans.
TechCrunch's Kincaid and others noted the advantages Facebook could bring to an email battle.
"Facebook has the world's most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well," Kincaid said.
"It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion.
"And there's also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you're connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly," he said.
Gadget blog Gizmodo said the prospect of an email service from Facebook should make Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft "very nervous."
"Facebook Mail could be a killer not only because of its potential instant size, but because of its natural advantage at making mail more useful," Gizmodo blogger Jesus Diaz said.
"Actually, it may become the only 100% useful mail service out there, only showing you the email you are actually interested in," Diaz said.
"Since Facebook knows how you interact with all your contacts, they would be able to perfectly separate what is important from what is not."
"Of course, not every Facebook user will jump on its mail bandwagon," Diaz added. "But chances are that a huge percentage of the user base will."
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San Francisco, California (CNN) -- Facebook wants to be your inbox for every kind of message.
The world's largest social networking company is providing each of its 500 million users with an @facebook.com e-mail address as part of a revamped messaging system that integrates with various types of communications.
Facebook's new inbox can tie together mail sent to someone's e-mail address, instant-message aliases and cell phone number in addition to Facebook's own messages and chat conversations. Like the News Feed, unread notes are ranked by how important Facebook thinks the sender is in your life, and users can tweak those settings.
"Because we know who your friends are," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "we can do some really good filtering for you."
Rather than creating separate threads for each conversation, Facebook logs all communications and groups them together by contact. So all chats with your mom are listed on one page. Based on a brief demo Monday, the stripped-down page resembles an IM or text-message window, eliminating the option of e-mail subject lines.
Facebook shakes up e-mail
"I should only need those two things: a person and a message," Andrew Bosworth, a software engineer at Facebook, said at the company's news event Monday. "The system is definitely not e-mail. We've actually modeled it more after chat."
Incoming messages pop up on the bottom of Facebook's site, similar to the chat feature.
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"We think that we should take features away from messaging," Zuckerberg said. "We think it should be minimal."
But like e-mail, users can attach files. Sharing documents via Microsoft's Office Web Apps service will be integrated "over the coming months," a Microsoft spokeswoman said.
The inbox is broken into three folders.
The "social inbox" contains conversations with your top contacts -- people you message with most often. An "other" folder keeps correspondences of less importance, or those with people or companies that Facebook's system is not familiar with, such as banking notices. (Operators of pages you've "Liked" can send messages to this folder as well.) Finally, the service filters what it thinks is spam into a last bin.
Facebook will launch this with a "slow rollout," said Bosworth, turning it on for more users over time. Facebook's iPhone application will support the new inbox Monday for accounts that have it enabled, Bosworth said.
The system may incorporate more services later. Zuckerberg said he considered voice as one.
For instant messaging, it supports Jabber -- the underlying technology of Google Chat -- but not Skype, AIM or Windows Live Messenger. Support for IMAP, which would allow Facebook.com e-mail users to access their inbox from a program such as Microsoft's Outlook, is in development, Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg opened the announcement by talking about changes in how young people communicate. He reminisced about a conversation with some high school students who said they primarily talked through Facebook and text messaging on their phones. E-mail is "too slow," he recalled them saying.
"It's not that e-mail doesn't get delivered immediately," Zuckerberg said. "It's too formal."
Numerous studies, as recently as April of this year, have found that e-mail is a very small part of how young people keep in touch. Facebook has modeled its new system to reflect those trends. Zuckerberg said 350 million people use its system for private correspondences, transmitting 4 billion messages a day.
Zuckerberg will take the stage again Tuesday during the Web 2.0 Summit, presumably to elaborate on this new system, which Bosworth said has been among the company's biggest undertakings. The project took about 18 months of work from 15 engineers -- the largest team the company has ever devoted to a new product, Bosworth said.
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