London: The trouble with e-mail, as the parent of every teenager knows, is that it's so, well Wednesday.
I mean to say, you have to think of a "subject" and whether you're going to start the message with "Dear" or "Hi!" or "Yo!". And then there's the problem of what you put at the end: "See you!" or "xxx" or "Gotta go" And don't even mention the issue of the "signature" at the end of the message you know, "Sent from my iPhone" and all that.
And on top of that, there's the fact that e-mail isn't synchronous.
You could send a message and the other person might not see it for, well, at least five minutes. This is the context in which Face-book's latest "messages" initiative needs to be seen.
Essentially, it's an aggregator - something that brings together text, chat and e-mail into one inbox. According to an interview that Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, gave at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, it stems from conversations he had some time ago with teenagers.
Diminishing role
He asked them how they communicated and noticed that e-mail played a diminishing role in their social lives. So he's had a team of 15 engineers beavering away on the messaging project for quite a while.
As with everything Face-book (or Google) does these days, the new service attracted lots of hyperbolic comment. "Facebook has not only reinvented the idea of the inbox," burbled Om Malek, normally a sober observer of these things, "but it has gone one better: it has done so by moving away from the traditional idea of e-mail."
One of the reasons why Yahoo and Google Mail have struggled to become entirely social is because it is hard to graft a social hierarchy on top of tools of communication.
Facebook did the exact opposite — it imagined e-mail only as a subset of what is in reality communication. SMS, chat, Facebook messages, status updates and e-mail is how Zuckerberg sees the world Facebook is now looking to become the ‘interaction hub' of our post-broadband, always-on lives."
The new service was also, inevitably, labelled a "Gmail killer", partly because Google and Facebook have recently had a spat over the latter's facility (now blocked) that allowed new subscribers to vacuum contact information in their Gmail inboxes without providing anything by way of reciprocation.
But this is a side issue.
The threat Facebook poses to Google has little to do with e-mail and everything to do with identity and advertising. At the moment, Google largely owns the online advertising business. But its founders can see a time coming when that bonanza will begin to wane.
Skyward curve
An obvious way of keeping the revenue curve heading skywards is to find more effective ways of targeting ads at users.
At the moment, Google's techniques for doing that are limited to parsing the words that Gmail users and bloggers employ in their communications.
That's why a Gmail message about recipes will have ads for cooking utensils and cookery books down the side.
This is pretty crude compared with what is theoretically possible. Google's problem is that it doesn't know enough about you to target ads with a high degree of precision: only what you write online.
Facebook, however, knows a great deal about you, even if you have locked down your privacy settings. It knows your real name, your gender, who your "friends" are, what you're doing at the moment, your interests and educational background, whether you are in a relationship, where you live and so on.
And although Zuckerberg swears that he has no intention of selling your identity to advertisers, he can give them enough general information to enable them to lob much more precisely targeted ads in your direction.
But there is something else that Google should find even more worrying, namely the intensity of Facebookers' involvement with the service. In September, Comscore reported that Facebook had passed Google in terms of total time spent accessing their services, while in August Neilsen reported that Facebook users spend, on average, 10 minutes on every visit.
In his interview, Zuckerberg gave another twist of this particular knife: half of his 500 million users, he revealed, visit the site every day. I make that 2.5 billion minutes a day. And who knows? Maybe some of them will even be spent doing e-mail.