Facebook has unveiled a new messaging platform in a hyped event on Monday. The revamped Facebook Messages brings together email, SMS, chat and direct messages on the social network in one place. The idea is, Facebook says, to simplify the way people communicate online and to make the technology used irrelevant.
Facebook has tried to make it clear that the new Messages is not an email-killer, as it has been labeled for the past week. However, all Facebook users that request it will get an @facebook.com email address.
"Today I'm excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages," Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, said.
"They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time," he added.
"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," he explained.
Social Inbox and Conversation History
All of this will be centered around your Facebook friends and their friends, which seems natural for the social network. All conversations are split into "Messages" and "Other."
By default, only messages from your friends end up in the main inbox, everything else will be sent to Other. This measure is mostly meant for email, as most other messages should be coming from your friends.
If you get a message from someone who isn't on Facebook, it will be sent to the Other folder, but you can then move the conversation permanently to the Messages folder if you actually know the person.
If this isn't enough, you can customize your privacy settings and stop receiving any messages from people you don't know.
What's more, all conversations, regardless of the medium, will be archived by Facebook. This way you can search through your conversation history even if the messages were sent by SMS or via Facebook chat.
Messages will be sent though the platform of your choice
The interesting part is that, even though all of this happens through Facebook, users will get to decide how to get their messages from their friends and family based on the platform they prefer.
Even though everyone will get a Facebook email address and will be able to send emails, the social network is not launching a full-blown email service. Any email sent via Facebook will be exactly as a message sent through the built-in system, there are no subject lines, no cc and so on.
Facebook believes that this is the future of communications and that messages need to be simple and short. Likewise, the tools used to send them, need to provide the basic functionality and not clutter the user with options and features they don't need.
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