Facebook Casts Wide Net Across Social Chatter

Facebook has revealed its new messaging system, which is designed to seamlessly tie together several different communications media into a single stream of interaction. "This is not an email killer, it's a messaging system that includes email," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "We don't expect people to wake up tomorrow and shut off their Yahoo or Gmail accounts."

It spans across a user's messaging systems, offering retention of a user's conversation history and a social inbox.

"We don't think that a modern messaging system is going to be email," Zuckerberg told his audience at the press conference in San Francisco.

"The weight and friction you have when thinking of the address you want to send an email to, write 'Hi, Mom' at the top, conclude it with all this extra stuff you have to add to an email really adds a lot of friction to the process of sending an email."

Facebook's new messaging system will integrate messages from any of several media -- SMS, email, Facebook messages or IM -- and will be simpler to use than email, Zuckerberg said.

The New Facebook Messaging System

Facebook's new messaging system will offer seamless integration of all the ways users interact with technology, Zuckerberg explained. "Your phone, Facebook, other websites, email, IM should all be seamlessly integrated," he said.

Facebook will give users email addresses on its domain, meaning they end in "@facebook.com," but using these will be optional. "We don't think email is the primary way people will use this system," Zuckerberg remarked. "This product will seamlessly integrate across all communications products very easily."

All communications between users will have one single thread regardless of the medium -- email, SMS, IMs or Facebook messages. Users can delete the history of a conversation if they want to.

"In real life, if you talk to someone you have a stream of conversation through IM or SMS, you don't have multiple threads. You have one thread with the person and that makes it simple to communicate with them," Zuckerberg said.

The social inbox gives priority to users' friends and "people they really care about," Zuckerberg said. Users enter their friends' lists and those friends enter their own friends' lists, so when a user gets a message from one of the people on those lists, it goes straight to the social inbox.

Whitelisting, which is used by most email systems, is not a practical solution because "nobody wants to make lists," Zuckerberg said.

A second inbox which users can check once a day will contain messages from people not close to them or from other sources. Users may scan this once a day or so, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook's new messaging system will also have a junk mailbox.

Users can move correspondents between the boxes, said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook, said.