Mark Zuckerberg says it's not email. But it might just replace it. Get ready for your @facebook.com address.
Every Ping In One Place
What are the difference between Facebook messages and regular email? It incorporates emails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients. Eventually VoIP may also be in play. Instead of having some chats here and some texts there, every time you talk to someone it'll be come part of a stream of information.
And while you can collect it all at an @facebook.com email address, it's not mandatory. You can redirect your Gmail messages there, for instance. And yes, an iPhone app update is coming shortly that incorporates Facebook Messages.
Notable differences from regular email? There are no subject lines, no CC or BCC. You can send a message just by hitting the Enter key. It's going to feel like chat. A lot of times, it's going to be chat.
Hanging On a Thread
There will also be a threading solution, which records every type of contact you've had with a person in one place. It's a one-stop conversation shop, a way to tell the full story of a conversation.
A Friends-Only Inbox
Facebook will also introduce the Social Inbox, which sorts your personal messages, prioritizing notes from friends and setting aside people you aren't as close with. This is the killer function: as a default, you'll only see messages from your friends (and friends of friends). Junk—from people who are outside of your Facebook circle—will go into a separate folder. And you can move people from one folder to the other (which is nice for those of us whose family doesn't have Facebook). You can also choose to actively bounce any email that's not from a friend.
As much as I enjoy Gmail's Priority Inbox, it can't filter nearly as effectively as Facebook can. That's the advantage of the "social graph" that Facebook can access, and why you're going to want to give this a serious look.
Why It Matters
Zuckerberg insists that this isn't going to be a Gmail killer, and for the time being, at least, he's right. But Facebook's looking towards the future, towards a generation that's steadily and increasingly been abandoning email for instant communication. And the more we abandon email for text and chat, the more Facebook's going to be the communication hub.
The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."
Messages are received in an inbox, but it eschews the conventions of email and Facebook messaging (subject lines, recipient/cc/bcc fields, and such,) and instead turns all conversation into a chat, where the conversation and the person you're conversing with are merged.
So if you and a friend are conversing over Facebook chat, then he switches over to a mobile device, the conversation stays in the same place, except it's being sent through SMS.
It currently handles the four different methods of communication, but as it rolls out, it will also become a sharing and collaboration platform. Microsoft announced today that it is integrating the Office Web Apps experience into Facebook's new messaging system. Users will be able to share Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents in Facebook messages, and download them to your desktop.
Facebook's new messaging system will be rolled out to different groups of users over the next few months, and will include a new mobile app, and @Facebook.com email addresses for interested users.
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