Does Facebook’s Project Titan give you Google Wave de ja vu?

The unveiling of Facebook’s new ‘modern messaging system’ on Monday – codenamed Project Titan – might have felt like Ground-hog day for many.

We have already been here, or somewhere like it, when Google’s web application ‘for real-time communication and collaboration’,  Google Wave was launched in May 2009.

Google killed it off only a few months ago after it failed to set the world alight, despite passionate support from its early adopters.

Many felt that the system, described by Techcrunch.com as ‘part email, part Twitter and part instant messaging did not set a new benchmark for interactivity as was promised, neither filling a gap nor creating something revolutionary.

While differences between Google Wave and Project Titan still remain to be seen, Facebook is already the weapon of choice for far more people than Gmail – with figures for Facebook users in the US at around the 100 million per month mark compared to Gmail’s 300,000, according to Quantcast.

The power gained from having a captive audience of this size should not be underestimated, particularly if Project Titan is ‘seamless, simple and immediate’ enough to become a part of our everyday Facebook lives, even if  just initially as an “incremental improvement“.

While most commentators argued against claims that this is the death knell for email, it is clearly a push for the next communications revolution. The question is perhaps not whether it will happen, but who will lead it.