Facebook Messaging – not Email, not Gmail.

Whoa! The rumors have come true yet again. Mark Zuckerberg just announced a brand new Facebook Messaging product which is a combination of 3 things

1. Seamless Messaging system – Facebook’s social inbox handles email, but also SMS and IM.
2. Conversation History – the new service will have a single conversation history for all your communication with a person, regardless of whether it comes via email, SMS, IM etc.
3. Social Inbox – Because Facebook knows who your friends are, you can see only messages that are really relevant.

It’s not email. It’s Social messaging!

Mark says it’s not email, but email is just a part of it. It’s social messaging which is email + chat + sms, all of which are seamlessly integrated.

Social Inbox is an inbox for filtering the messages you want to see from friends. Interestingly enough, Facebook is handing out facebook.com e-mail addresses to all users.

Here are the keys to what a modern messaging system needs according to Zuckerberg:

• seamless
• informal
• immediate
• personal
• simple
• minimal
• short

Facebook.com mail invites

Well, just like Google Facebook is going the invite way. To start off, few people will be getting the invites to test the messaging system. So you might have to wait a while (few months may be) to try it out.

Update: [How to] Get a Facebook Email Invite