Facebook "email"?

Zuck made an interesting announcement at a press conference today. He announced a new service on Facebook that will allow greater commiunication for Facebook members. Here's how Harry McCracken of  Techlan saw it:

For months, there have been rumors that Facebook was working on turning the inboxes of its 500 million-plus users into a full-blown e-mail service. Today, Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally unveiled the subject of the rumors--code-named "Titan" and officially named simply "Facebook Messages"--at an event in San Francisco. And he spent much of his time stressing that whatever this new thing is, it's not e-mail. (More on Time.com: Why Facebook Deals is Bad News for Foursquare)

Instead, it's a massive update to Facebook's current messaging system, chat feature, text-messaging integration, and smartphone applications that mashes up all sorts of communications (including e-mail) into one unified stream. Zuckerberg and Facebook engineering honcho Andrew Bosworth mostly talked about the service rather than demoing it, but they said that it'll include features such as these:

• Every Facebook user will get an e-mail address: If your Facebook profile is located at facebook.com/yournamehere, your e-mail address will be yournamehere@facebook.com.
• If you're logged into Facebook, incoming e-mail will show up in the service's chat service; reply to a message, and it'll be sent as an e-mail.
• Similarly, the Facebook iPhone app will notify you of e-mail and let you receive and send messages. (An Android version will come along later.)
• In a feature that sounds a little like Google's Priority Inbox, you can organize the people you receive messages from into important folks (friends and family), others who aren't so vital (your credit card company, say), and Junk. The goal is let you see stuff you really want to see immediately, allow you to check in on less urgent messages once a day, and ignore spam.
• You can also choose to have messages from people not on your Facebook friends list bounced, period.
• Like e-mail, Facebook messages will be able to include file attachments; a deal with Microsoft will let you edit documents using the Office Web Apps online suite.
• The service will go beyond threaded-message interfaces such as Gmail's Conversations by letting you scroll back through all the communications you've had with a particular person via Facebook, all in one place. (You'll be able to opt out of this--or skip all the new features, period--but that presumably won't be enough to satisfy every privacy watchdog out there. In fact, I can hear them growling from here.)