Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, today unveiled a new social messaging feature on Facebook (official blog post) at the company’s headquarters that aims to consolidate different communication medias into one primary place.
Users will be able to manage different e-mail addresses, their text messages, and Facebook messages directly from one application.
The Messages application would display conversations with friends, and friends of friends, with other non-personal messages being kept separate in another view.
The company says the service would make communicating with friends easier by using a central application to send messages via different methods, be it an e-mail, or an SMS message, instead of having to use non-centralized different communication mediums that are preferred by friends.
The company says its objective is to create a service that is minimal, seamless, and informal.
Facebook will also be launching its own @facebook.com e-mail service for users who want a personalized Facebook e-mail address, but users don’t have to register one, rather, they could use their existing e-mail addresses from other service providers such as Google’s gmail service.
Facebook has chosen not to implement a traditional subject line saying it is not efficient, proving the point by saying the most number of messages sent through Facebook did not even have a subject line at all, with the second most popular subject line being “Hi”.
More than 4-billion messages are transmitted through Facebook on a daily basis, including direct messages and instant messages.
Users will also be able to view select Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint presentation documents from their messages directly from the messaging application in Facebook.
There is also Microsoft Exchange support.
The company will be rolling out the service in the coming weeks, with beta invitations given to a select group of users, including members of the press that were invited to the press event today.
Facebook is planning to release an updated iPhone application that will include the new features, and will subsequently release the updated features for other mobile platforms such as Google Android.
The conversations would remain perfectly synchronized across your mobile devices and your PC browser, meaning that no longer will SMS messages be stuck on your mobile phone, every message (from different mediums) would be accessible from a primary application.
Facebook is also developing advanced privacy settings that would allow users to entirely block specific people from sending them messages, or even going as far as blocking messages from all non-friends.
The company did not disclose a time frame as to the availability of the mobile applications.
Hercules holds a B.Comm Finance from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 2 Candidate. He was previously a contributor at FiLife, a finance website owned by Dow Jones and IAC. 
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