Last week, Marketingmagazine.com.au reported Facebook’s announcement of its new ‘Deals’ offering, a move that clearly went after a cut of Foursquare’s market. Now Facebook looks to have moved on to even bigger beasts, taking on email giants like Gmail and MSN by announcing a new ‘full circle communication service’ that incorporates email.

Zuckerberg announced the new ‘Facebook Titan’ program at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and showed off how the service will work.

‘Titan’ incorporates text messages, emails, and Facebook messages, allowing users to see all there communication threads with any specific person within a few seconds.

Despite the press saturation about the email component, Zuckerberg doesn’t see the focus of the program as email.

It is true that people will be able to have facebook.com email addresses, but this is not email, he said in San Francisco. It handles email.

We dont expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say Im going to shut down my Yahoo Mail or Gmail account, he said.

But it may be a case of semantics, as it became clear Zuckerberg sees the new addition to Facebook as a game changer and ultimately a way to wipe out email as we know it today.

Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out, people will start to say this is how the future should work, Zuckerberg said.

Maybe email wont be as important a part as it was before and we can push people toward real-time conversations.

From a marketing viewpoint, these latest developments seem to offer another medium to reach consumers through Facebook,

“For Australian marketers, who are sending billions of emails to their customers every year, this creates both opportunity and threat,” writes Director of EservicesResponsys Simon O’Day in an exclusive blog for Marketing magazine.

“As Facebook rolls out its service we are likely to see a lot of people, younger people in particular, who already have considerably lower than usual email usage, migrating over to Facebook as their primary inbox.”

“Marketers will need to watch closely how Project Titan evolves, and, in particular, consider how to gain and retain permission to send messages directly.”

Read Simon O’Day’s blog here