The world is forever changing in the world of the Internet….so much so that at times it’s hard to keep up. So here is something else to rock your technological boat….

‘Facebook has unveiled a new messaging platform which takes aim at one of the internet’s first applications, email.

Although blogs had been speculating that Facebook would announce an email service to rival Google’s Gmail and others, Facebook said email was just one component of its plans.

Declaring email past its prime in the age of texts and instant messages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company doesn’t believe email is going to be a modern messaging system. The first internet email system arrived in the early 1970s.

“If we do a good job, some people will say this is the way that the future 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 media.

But he also said that just as high school students are forgoing email in favor of shorter, more immediate chats, more people down the line will send IMs and chats because it’s simpler, “more fun” and more valuable to use.

Though email is still a primary form of communication for older adults, recent studies suggest this is not the case for young people.

Text messaging has surpassed face-to-face contact, email, phone calls and instant messaging as the primary form of communication for US teens, according to a 2009 survey from the Pew Research Center’s American Life Project.

Email use was the lowest – only 11 per cent of teens said they use it every day to interact with friends, compared with 54 per cent who said they text daily and 30 per cent who said they use land-line phones.

The popular social network unveiled its plans in San Francisco, a day before Zuckerberg speaks at the web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Underscoring the enormity of the project, Facebook’s director of engineering, Andrew Boz Bosworth, said 15 Facebook engineers worked on the project for 15 months.’

Source: The Courier Mail