As rumored yesterday, Facebook would be announcing a new web based “e-mail” service soon – and now they have. They call it Facebook Messages.
Actually, it’s not really like the e-mail we know and use every day. Here’s how Facebook put it on their blog:
We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.
Messages will be prioritized depending on who they are from. If they arrive at your @facebook.com e-mail address, they’ll go into “Others”. If they arrive from somebody you know, they’ll go into Inbox. It will also be possible to integrate it with some, still unknown, Instant Messaging clients.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook spent 15 months to develop Facebook Messages and it will be available in the coming months. If you can’t wait, you can request an invitation here.
I must admit that I’m not really sure what to think about Facebook Messages yet. I see the upside, that it’s more like chat and you can get chat messages into your Inbox from people e-mailing you on @facebook.com, which is not possible (as far as I know) with MSN Messenger, ICQ, Skype etc. – with those services it arrives as regular e-mail and “outside” the actual chat conversation.
However, I couldn’t imagine not being able to CC, BCC and use subject lines. I guess you can’t send a e-mail “Facebook Message” to somebody outside of Facebook, unless they e-mail you first? I mean, what would the subject then be and how would the recipient be able to sort through incoming messages (from Facebook) if you cannot define the subject of your message.
We’ll just have to see in the coming months as more and more people are getting access to Facebook Messages.
PS: Remember, Facebook likes to know as much as possible about you and your friends, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to stick their noise into whatever goes through your Facebook Messages inbox. Keep that in mind…
UPDATE – Video added:
oh yeah.. I just know now..
why like that, so how about google?
Sure this going to affect gmail. Lets see. 🙂
i requested for the service , still awaiting approval … no updates .. 🙁 … need to reserve my username as quick as possible …
I agree with all points. I also agree with him that we shouldn’t create the agitated short-attention world problem worse. Thanks 🙂
is that e-mail service? i do not think so
When they will allow us to use this service, i requested for this couple of weeks back,still no word from them..If someone got it please share here your views…
James
It’s really neat writing facebook an very useful tips for facebook have e-mail service that even I don’t know. Today I will check facebook messages, thanks for provide this info.
i’m sticking with gmail and yahoo for my email at least. spread things up a bit.
Il parait qu’à partir d’aujourd’hui la messagerie Facebook est accessible aux utilisateurs