There's always been more to Facebook than status updates and wall posts. When you want to have less public, more personal conversations with friends and family, Facebook's instant messaging and message inbox have provided a way to do that. But then when you want to talk to people outside of Facebook, you've had to go to an email client, or send a phone text message.
That's all about to change. Facebook has begun to introduce new features in its Messages service that will give its hundreds of millions of users another way to reach out and touch friends—and give them less reason to log into another website. Announced at a press conference on November 15, Facebook Messages isn't just instant messaging or e-mail—it ties together Facebook's own instant messaging and e-mail-like messaging through the Facebook website and smartphone applications with phone texting and regular email in a way that makes them a natural extension of the sorts of conversations people already have in Facebook. And it's going to make people at Google, Yahoo, and AOL very, very nervous.
Facebook will offer all of its over 500 million users an "@facebook.com" email address based on their Facebook user name—the unique name that identifies their profile page. You'd think that this would make it a giant magnet for "spam"—an email address associated with you that can be found easily by web search. But one of the powerful things about Facebook Messaging is that it will only show messages from friends by default—and it can be set to "bounce" emails from people that you don't want to get messages from. If you have friends or family who only use email, you can add them into the list of senders to accept.
The by-default restriction to friends for Messaging is a big deal, but the privacy settings for Messaging go further. You'll be able to block messages from any individual or email address at any time.
Another interesting thing about the service is that it organizes all the conversations you have with someone—over email, SMS, Facebook IM or Facebook message—into a conversation thread that doesn't care where the messages came from. Conversation threads with groups of friends will be preserved just as they are in current Facebook messages, and in the comments on Wall posts. Conversations can flow from email to IM and back again—if a person is online, messages show up as instant messages, and they can respond immediately; if they're offline, they go into the inbox. And wh
And messaging also creates a "shoe box" for all of the message conversations you've had organized by the people you had them with, so you can go back through chronologically and see everything you've talked about with each person.
Facebook calls this approach "the Social Inbox". Google tried something similar with its ill-fated Wave project, but never really found a way to get people interested in it. But by integrating all message types into a single thread, organized around who sent it rather than subject lines, Facebook Messaging provides a timeline of conversations for each contact, making it a lot easier to track than Wave's newfangled threading.
Facebook's email won't replace other email accounts—it doesn't do fancy things like subject lines, or allow you to do old-fashioned memo things like "cc" or "blind cc", so it's not about to replace your work email or the mail account you use for more formal reasons. But it will certainly cut down on the amount of time most people spend using mail if they buy into the idea of having one place to keep all of those communications with friends and family—a sort of digital "shoe box" of correspondence.
I'm guessing that will be a lot of people. It may not be all Facebook users, or even the 350 million that actively send messages through Facebook today. But even if just half of those people decide to spend their time with personal correspondence in Facebook instead of GMail, Yahoo or AOL Mail, that's going to have a huge impact in terms of lost advertising for those companies. And it might even simplify the way families keep in touch in the process.