صحافة دولية » Facebook announces Messages service

www.reuters.com_202vancouversun
By Matt Hartley

If you thought you were spending a lot of time on Facebook already, just wait until you see Facebook s new Messages service.

On Monday, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world s largest social network plans to launch an updated version of its messaging service that will allow users to send emails and SMS text messages from inside their Facebook Messages account, and that the Palo Alto, California-based company will enable the site s more than 500 million users to each have their own "facebook.com" email address.

"We do not think that a modern messaging system will be email," Zuckerberg said during a presentation to announce the new service.

There was a great deal of speculation over the weekend that Facebook was planning to launch an email service to compete with Microsoft s Hotmail and Google s Gmail services.

However, Zuckerberg was quick to point out that the updated version of Messages was not an "email killer."

"It is not email, it handles email in addition to Facebook Messages . . . it is true people are going to be able to have Facebook.com email address, but it is not email," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said users will be able to have a facebook.com email address that matches their public user name. However, he said the new service goes beyond email and will allow users to integrate text messaging, email and Facebook chat. Users will also be able to send attachments through the new Facebook Messages platform.

As well, in an effort to combat spam, users who adjust their privacy settings to accept messages from only their friends will have all other emails bounced away from their inbox.

Zuckerberg said that email should be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. He said the new service is centered around three ideas: social messaging, conversation history and a social inbox.

Already, about 350 million people are using Facebook s messaging technology and more than four billion messages are sent every day, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook plans to roll out the service to its users in the United States first. Facebook officials gave no timetable for when the service will be available in Canada, although it is expected to arrive sometime in early 2011.

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