You’ve no doubt heard or read about Facebook’s new messaging announcement this week. If not, the company announced a new messaging system to combine email, SMS, IM, Chat, and other forms of online communication, bringing them into one inbox. Along with this comes @facebook.com email addresses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the system as “starting from scratch” as opposed to being a Facebook email product.

Pat Matthews, SVP of RackSpace’s cloud computing business, which includes business email, shared some thoughts with us about the impact Facebook’s new offering will have on the email industry. RackSpace itself powers business email for over 2 million users.

“I don’t think Facebook will encroach on business mail, at least not anytime soon, mostly because of the security and privacy implications,” Matthews tells WebProNews. “Facebook is very consumer oriented and I don’t see this crossing into business anytime soon. Mark Zuckerberg has specifically stated the company is all about consumers. His focus is leading them to greatness.”

“I do think consumer mail is at risk,” he adds. “Consumers live in Facebook, not on Google. I think that Gmail and AOL should be worried.”

Still, Google has Google Apps going for it, which it has now expanded to encompass most of the company’s offerings. That could play a significant role in keeping businesses using Google, though Gmail has always been a part of Google Apps. I have to wonder if Google’s news wasn’t somehow spurred by Facebook’s.

“Facebook users will use Facebook mail as an extension of their already popular messaging services,” says Matthews. “I have no doubt this will be extremely popular.”

“Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the planet,” he adds. “I think that they will influence all types of applications, business and consumer.”

It’s no secret that businesses are already placing a great deal of emphasis on reaching Facebook users, and it will be very interesting to see the impact the new messaging system has on their strategies. I’ve already speculated that we’ll start seeing more businesses utilizing personal profiles to try and get into Facebook users’ primary inboxes (as the system filters messages that aren’t from “friends” into a secondary inbox).

Social media and email have been getting closer and closer with one another for some time already. “In the past, organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,” said Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, who predicts 20% of employees will use social networks as a main business communication tool by 2014.

“Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles,” she said. “However, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organizations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.””

When asked what Facebook’s new system means for the larger trend of social networking and email converging, Matthews told WebProNews, “Consumers want one view for many things but they also want very different views for their personal and business lives. This is why I really think Gmail should be worried.”

It is worth noting that the conversation with Matthews took place before Google’s announcement, so I’ll have to find out if this changes his opinion on that.

Could Facebook Even Survive Without Email?

Facebook thinks email is dying. Classic. How many times have we heard this now? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference recently, essentially claiming as much.

“In consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and the latest figures say that only 11% of teenagers email daily. So email (I can’t imagine life without it) is probably going away. So what do teenagers do? They SMS and increasingly they use social networking.”

First off, Facebook couldn’t exist without email. You need an email address to sign up and to log-in. Many of us rely on email for notifications from Facebook to know when someone has sent us a message, commented on our posts, invited us to an event, tagged us in a photo, etc. In fact, I’d be curious to see how frequently the average Facebook user would come back to Facebook daily without email notifications.

Email lubricates social interactions on Facebook, and I’d be very curious to see how successful Facebook would be without any email integration. I suspect it would die.

To be fair, Sandberg was looking to the future, and not the present when she made this claim. She even said that she couldn’t imagine life without email. It’s interesting, because Facebook is in some ways helping keep email relevant for the reasons mentioned above (though email certainly doesn’t need Facebook’s help to stay relevant).

Facebook requires you to use email to sign-up and log-in, but we are seeing more and more open protocols being used around the web for ID authentication. There are also not-so-open protocols in use, like Facebook Connect. I can log-in to a wide variety of sites/apps with my Facebook ID, but I can’t log-in to Facebook with anything other than my email address. If Facebok thinks email is dying, does that mean it will adopt some other open authentication protocols? Don’t these protocols generally come back to having an email address in the first place anyway?

The popularity of specific social networks comes and goes, but email has been around for a while, and has really shown no signs of going anywhere. Here’s something to consider – how many years has your inbox been flooded with spam? Has it caused you to use email any less? Granted, Facebook does continue to grow, even in the face of massive privacy concerns, but that’s hardly an indication that it could replace email. Sandberg didn’t suggest Facebook itself would replace email, but that SMS and social networking in general would. We’ll see. If Facebook hopes to be a significant part of that replacement on the social networking end, they’re probably going to have to play a little nicer with the open web movement.

I’ll come back to the conclusion we always reach. There is room for both email and social networks. Just like there is now, there will be in the future. As far as marketing is concerned, social networks appear to be greatly enhancing email campaigns. A recent study from GetResponse found that campaigns utilizing these networks were able to increase click-through-rates by 30%.

Webstyles is currently creating an application for users to save their hosting account details once and automatically login and manage email accounts,login to Cpanel, upload files, get live chat support, log support tickets or access the knowledge base. Gone are the days of opening an email to find a url and your possible expired password and user-name. Support for multiple domains will also be available shortly and will provide a clients who are new to hosting an easy way to manage their essential domain functions.

We plan to have a stable version by end of February

And if the demand is high will offer it to all cpanel Users Early March 2010

Please Reply to this post with any additional features you would like to see in future builds