During Monday’s Facebook press conference Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth took the stage to promote Facebook Messages, a complete overhaul of the existing Facebook messaging interface that will aggregate outside email, SMS, Facebook messages and chat into your Facebook inbox. Over the next few months all Facebook users will have the opportunity to opt in and claim a new vanity email address @facebook.com, and all messages sent to and from that address will be archived as Facebook Messages.
Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth claims his team has spent more than a year designing the service, and PCWorld editor Mark Sullivan caught up with him after the event to discuss the finer points of how Facebook Messages works, which services are supported and why consumers ought to consider adopting Facebook as a mail client.
But how does sending and receiving your email and other messages through Facebook actually work? Most consumers will have to wait a few months for an invite to try out the new Facebook Messages system, but we were lucky enough to snag a few minutes on a demo station to take the service for a test drive.
Brave the sights and sounds of downtown San Francisco to see PCWorld editor Mark Sullivan’s guided tour of the new Facebook Messages interface, including a first look at features like SMS messaging and the automatic filtering at work in your “social inbox.”