A few days back when I visited youtube I was surprised to see a "like" button at the bottom of every video . There is no doubt that social networking is the future of the web and if Google is the daddy of "search engines" then Facebook is the daddy of "social networking " .
Just like Google is trying new Web 2.0 products to invade the Facebook's market if Facebook also launches a search engine that prioritizes results around the known preferences of a user's circle, then the commercial potential of social networking would be extended.
Facebook launches "Project Titan " .
Facebook today announced it's long awaited "Project Titan" which is also known unofficially as “Gmail killer”. Project Titan is what Zuckerberg refers to as "Modern messaging system" .The project took 15 months effort to develop Messages and has been the biggest engineering project that Facebook has undertaken, involving 15 engineers .
* The central thesis of "Modern messaging system" is that messaging should be simple and unified, which is why it integrates IM, chat, SMS and e-mail into one inbox.
* Facebook which has currently 500-million users will provide "@facebook.com" email address to all its users.
* Though it is still in Beta phase and may take a few months to provide this facility to its 500 million users .
* The "Modern messaging system " has been referred as evolutionary than revolutionary.
* Facebook rebuilt their entire messaging system from the ground up.
Potential :
* There is no doubt that the project has a huge potential as 350 million members out of over 500 million members are already using Facebook’s messaging system .
* More than 4 billion messages are sent every day on Facebook .
So what is it exactly about ?
Seamless Messaging
* This means that it's you who decides how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages.
* You just have to choose the name of the person you want to talk to and type a message.
* Most of the facebook users are either teens or youngsters . As this generation uses e-mail rarely Facebook will try to tap the huge potential this group offers by bringing them to messaging forefront .
Conversation History
* You won't have to search your inbox to find your messages to one of your friends .
* All of your messages with someone will be together in one place, whether they are sent over chat, email or SMS.
* You can see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation.
The Social Inbox
* Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends.
* All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.
* If someone you know isn't on Facebook, that person's email will initially go into the Other folder.
* You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there.
* You can also change your account settings to be even more limited and bounce any emails that aren't exclusively from friends.
* This kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time .
* Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you're now in control of who can actually reach you.
Cons:
* Privacy : Privacy has been the biggest concern with everything related to facebook and this project is no exception .
* It currently doesn't have IMAP support i.e. you cannot sync it with other email systems .
Know more about project Titan at Official Facebook blog .
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