Facebook Email

Facebook has announced it’s entry into Email applications arena by launching new service Facebook messaging. Facebook’s argument is, “email is too formal” and it’s product focuses on modern messaging system which needs to be lightweight, instant, informal and simple to use. It is being rolled out initially for invite only.

The key points that Facebook’s founder Zuckerberg mentioned at the launch is “Seamless Messaging”, “Conversation history”, “Social Inbox”. Users will be able to have @facebook.com email IDs and Facebook employees will be moved to FB.com. Apparently Facebook bought the FB.com domain from American Farm Bureau.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-acquired-fb-com-from-the-american-farm-bureau

On the technology front Facebook moves from Cassandra to hBase for the database. Facebook has put its biggest engineering team for this new product (15 engineers).  To a post launch question about how will this impact competition with Google, Zuckerberg replied “Gmail is a great product”, and “email is still really important to a lot of people”.

With this new development it is going to be interesting to see how the email competition unfolds between biggies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.

Siraj