Email and Facebook and Texts, oh my!

For many around the world, Facebook has become the main way we communicate with friends, family, and even people we don’t know so well. In fact, it’s often hard to contact people at their personal email addresses, since they hardly check them anymore. Email is for business, Facebook is for personal communication and chat for many. And when you need to tell someone something quickly, why call? Most people just text anyhow, right?

Facebook has decided to do something about these gaps. They are currently in the process of updating Facebook Messages to let them be your single source for emails, texts, chats, and Facebook messages. If you already use Facebook for the majority of your messages, you’ll find it handy to now have a central dashboard for all of your communications, no matter what media you’re using. My personal Facebook account has recently been updated to the new Messages account, so let’s take a look at the new features and see if Facebook can replace Gmail and Outlook, too.

Getting Your New Messages Account

Facebook will eventually roll out the new Messages by default to all accounts, but for now it’s a beta option. You can signup to get on the beta list at http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/. Once you’re accepted, you’ll be prompted to upgrade your account when you login to Facebook. Click the Upgrade Now button to get started.

Facebook will send you to your Messages page, where you’ll see a popup listing your new Facebook email address.  This will be the same as your public username; if you’ve never set one, you’ll have to set it before you can get your new Messages account. There’s no way to edit the address, so just click Activate Email … there’s really nothing else to do. Your new Facebook email will now be em>your_username@facebook.com.

The new Facebook Messages incorporates email, traditional Facebook messages, chats, and even text messages. If you’d like your friends to be able to send you text messages via Facebook Messages, and have not already enabled text messaging on your Facebook account, you’ll be prompted to add this additionally once you’ve activated your email. You don’t have to enable text messaging; I personally left it off. If your friends have enabled text messaging, though, you can still send them texts through Facebook Messages even if you don’t enable it.

Using the New Facebook Messages

Ready to email a normal email address from your Facebook account? Just create a new message as normal, except this time, type in the recipient's email address instead of selecting their name from your friend list. You can add pictures and attachments to emails. All of these new features are included in traditional Facebook Messages too, plus you can send the message as a text to friends who’ve enabled it. One major difference between sending an email from Facebook versus other email apps is that you can’t use rich text formatting in Facebook Messages.

Emails you send from Facebook will look just like emails sent from any other email client. They’ll show that they came from your Facebook email address. Any attachments or pictures you added will be ready for previewing or downloading as normal. If they reply to your message, it’ll go to your Facebook mailbox directly, even if they’re not a Facebook user. Also, of course, your friends can email you directly to your em>your_username@facebook.com address.

Back in your Facebook, you’ll see replies in conversation view, and can still access the attachments you added to messages. Reply at the bottom as you normally would in Facebook. There’s a new box on the bottom right, too: check it, and you can reply by just hitting enter. This is useful if you normally send short messages, but otherwise, it might be more annoying than helpful!

Then, from the top of the page, you can archive, delete, block messages as spam, or even forward messages. Yes, the one thing that Facebook almost killed has been brought back: the dreaded Forward.

Facebook now also includes a more advanced message search that works fairly good. It doesn’t accept advanced search operators, though, but you can restrict your search to archived messages, sent mail, and more. For casual email purposes, it’s generally enough for what most people would need.

Conclusion

So that’s it. Facebook now includes a nearly full-featured email client in Messages. To me, the best part of it is that chats are now saved in Messages, so you can look back over them or continue a conversation even if your friend is offline. Plus, many people now use Facebook as their primary place to communicate, so including email too makes sense. Since you can include attachments and pictures, and could even collaborate on Office documents with Docs.com, it really might be a better email solution for anyone that usually finds email too confusing. For everyone with more advanced needs, though, you’ll likely want to keep using Google Apps, Outlook, or your other current email solution.

Do you think you’ll be using Facebook for normal emails now? Or are you tired of using Facebook for all of your communications? If you’re still using Facebook daily, don’t forget to fan Techinch.com on Facebook so you can keep up with all the new tips, tricks, and reviews posted here!

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