Facebook today announced a new messaging system which combines various channels of communications such as Instant Messaging (Facebook chat to be specific), Facebook messages, e-mail and SMS. It will have a Social Inbox that aggregates all your messages and it will also maintain your Conversation History for reference and archiving. Facebook messaging will also support IMAP in future.
The new messaging system is going to use your vanity URL. So, if you have a URL like www.facebook.com/yourname, you will be able to register your yourname@facebook.com.
You can get a vanity URL here: http://www.facebook.com/username/ if you haven’t set up one yet.
Now whenever someone sends you a message on that email address, you have the option to get it either in the chat box, inbox or the message will be pushed to your mobile phone. This allows you to quickly reply back through a medium that is easily accessible.
Facebook has updated the iPhone App with this new feature, you can download it from the link provided at the end of the post.
The Conversation History will store all your conversations made with any user via chat, email or SMS. From here you can go through the entire history anytime you want seamlessly.
The Social Inbox has a feature similar to Priority inbox for Gmail. This feature will sort messages from your friends, and friends of friends in a separate folder, while other less important messages will be in another folder. Spam mails are hidden automatically.
Check out the video below to see how it all works:
Facebook’s new Social Messaging feature is currently in invite-only and you will have to wait till someone invites you to try it out. Facebook will be rolling out this to everyone in the coming months. If you want to request for an invite, you can do so here. http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/
Download: Facebook iPhone App