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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks around the new email service at an annunciation in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 15, 2010. AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MICHAEL LIEDTKEAP Technology Writers
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks around the new email service at an annunciation in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 15, 2010. AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Facebook unveiled a new messaging platform Monday that takes aim at one of the Internet`s first applications, e-mail.Although blogs had been speculating that Facebook would announce an e-mail service to rival Google Inc.`s Gmail and others, Facebook said e-mail was but one part of its plans.Declaring e-mail past its heyday in the age of texts and instant messages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the party doesn`t believe e-mail is leaving to be a modern messaging system. The first Internet e-mail system arrived in the early 1970s."If we do a secure job, some people will say this is the way that the next will work," Zuckerberg said.Zuckerberg dismissed notions that "Project Titan," as its service is called, is the "Gmail killer" it`s been dubbed as in the press. But he too said that exactly as high school students are forgoing e-mail in favour of shorter, more immediate chats, more people land the air will send IMs and chats because it`s simpler, "more fun" and more valuable to use.Though e-mail is even a main work of communication for elderly adults, recent studies suggest this is not the character for new people. Text messaging has surpassed face-to-face contact, e-mail, phone calls and instant messaging as the main work of communication for U.S. teens, according to a 2009 survey from the Pew Internet and American Animation Project.E-mail use was the lowest - only 11 percent of teens said they use it every day to interact with friends, compared with 54 percent who said they text daily and 30 percent who said they use landline phones.The democratic social network unveiled its plans in San Francisco on Monday, a day before Zuckerberg speaks at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.Underscoring the outrageousness of the project, Facebook`s director of engineering, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said 15 Facebook engineers worked on the plan for 15 months.
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