Facebook Email

Facebook now offer their 600 million users a new unified message service - Facebook messages, Facebook chats and even a Facebook email address all find their way into a single inbox. In order to get this service you will need to upgrade to the Facebook Messages service. Invitations will appear when you log into Facebook.com but until you receive yours you can find out more from Facebook New Messages.

Once upgraded you can claim your @facebook.com email address. Here's how: Click Here. by default your @facebook.com email address will be your vanity URL which you may have chosen in 2009. Here's a quick reminder of the username/vanity URL feature.

It will be interesting to see if the addition of a facebook email service will have any impact of the existing web based email dominance of Microsofts Hotmail, Google's GMail and Yahoo's YMail. The Facebook email experience isn't as fully featured as GMail, for example. Facebook Messages seems to focus on continual conversations with friends, in a similar mannor to the old facebook messaging service. The ability to start these conversations from an external email service would appear to be the only real benefit.

The iPhone app highlights the change: