Facebook has just launched a new messaging service, not a new email system that people speculated and called “the Gmail killer”. This new service is what CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg called a “modern messaging system”, because he thinks “email’s too formal”.

The new system is designed to be seamless, simple, and short in comparison. “We think we should take features away from messaging — it should be simple.” All that said, it’ll handle email and users can have facebook.com email addresses. But why isn’t it called an email yet having an email address? That’s because it also integrates SMS, IM, and Facebook messages – Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t think email will be the primary way people use the system, and your conversation history will integrate messages from across various services into threads.

Facebook is also doing what it calls a “social inbox,” which sounds like Gmail’s priority inbox on steroids — it uses your Facebook contacts list to automatically build whitelists for important messages. Unfortunately, there’s no IMAP support at launch, so you won’t be able to plug in your favorite mail client, but it’s coming, says Facebook. The new messaging system should be rolling out slowly over the next few months. By the time it’s fully launched, Facebook should have a better name to call the service than just plain “new messaging system”.

SOURCE via Facebook