Facebook launch event — [Live blogging]

Way back in February of 2010, Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch that “Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully-featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer.” Facebook has been in lockdown all summer long developing a range of new features, and commentators are expecting big things from the event.

Memeburn’s San Francisco correspondent Kevin Grant is blogging live from the event…

Cool crowd here, lots of technorati: Robert Scoble, Charlene Li, & Dan Gillmor chatting around one of the front tables. #fmail

Looks like Scoble just got hooked up with a sweet inteview … the Z himself?

Zuckerberg says 4 billion private messages sent on Facebook every day. #facebookmail #fmail

E-mail is indeed part of the new offering, and interested users will be provided @facebook.com addresses. #fmail #facebookmail

“Next Generation Messaging” should be informal, seamless, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, short

We think we should take features away from messaging, people expect us to add features to messaging

The three key components of today’s announcement: Seamless Messaging, Conversation History & Social Inbox. #fmail Should be a convergence messaging system

No one is looking at the presentation or Mark, they are all busy live tweeting & blogging. #fmail

Zuck: “Social inbox” — we can do some good filtering for you to show you emails that only you care about. The biggest problem on email is spam. For spam we build whitelists, we can get messages filtered to you from friends of friends… social inbox = high frequency personal friends and then another inbox for general friends, less personal [ie a high priority, special inbox]. Social inbox to filter the exact messages that you want to see.

“This is not email” Zuckerberg says. #fmail

Boz: the communication with who we care about is “fragmented” — too many different ways to communicate (SMS, phone, email etc), that’s why we’re giving people an @facebook.com email address

Zuck: One of the goals of Facebook is to make it easier for me to communicate with people. So I dont think the goal was to “expand the social graph”…it was just map it out.

People can choose to use the new email or not — up to them. Same as people getting text alerts — their choice.

The Facebook team emphasizing this product will play well with other email clients. “I think Gmail is a really good product,” Zuck says.

Email addresses not linked to profiles for now — maybe later though

Question: What happens to your corporate Facebook email addresses?

Zuck: we now have FB.com — purchased from the farmers (American Farm Bureau). [laughter] Facebook is for the people, Facebook employees will probably choose something else.

Question: what happens to friends that are not my real friends on facebook? ie not all friends are equal.

A: you can choose to get an email address or not choose. FB friends can send you FB messages anyway — so no difference really.

People will be able to forward messages, using @facebook mail

Facebook will not give exact number on email storage limitation… but normal users wont have to worry, ie if you dont abuse system storage will not be an issue for you