Facebook just launched a new messaging service — what Mark Zuckerberg called a “modern messaging system,” not a new
email system. Email’s “too formal,” according to Zuck, and the new
system is designed to be seamless, simple, and short in comparison. “We
think we should take features away from messaging — it should be
simple.” All that said, it’ll handle email and users can have
facebook.com email addresses, but it also integrates SMS, IM, and
Facebook messages — Zuck doesn’t think email will be the primary way
people use the system, and your conversation history will integrate
messages from across various services into threads. Facebook is also
doing what it calls a “social inbox,” which sounds like Gmail’s priority
inbox on steroids — it uses your Facebook contacts list to
automatically build whitelists for important messages. Unfortunately,
there’s no IMAP support at launch, so you won’t be able to plug in your
favorite mail client, but it’s coming, says Facebook. The new messaging
system should be rolling out slowly over the next few months.
