Facebook has updated and improved its messaging service and is aiming to take on popular email services from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The company unveiled its new messaging service during a special press event in San Francisco yesterday.

 

The world’s most popular social network has ramped up its Facebook Messages service and is now looking to combine texts, online chats, as well as emails into one central location. These types of messages will be socially ranked and sorted according to how important the sender is to the receiving Facebook user, with your Inbox only containing messages from your friends and their friends, while all other messages will go into an Other folder. User’s inboxes will also sort related messages into conversation histories.

 

“This is not an email killer,” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said according to the BBC. “Maybe we can help push the way people do messaging more towards this simple, real time, immediate personal experience. Email is still really important to a lot of people. We think this simple messaging is how people will shift their communication.”

 

This move is not the ‘Gmail Killer’ service that most were expecting and Zuckerberg doesn’t envisage the new service as being the writing on the wall for Gmail and other email services.

 

“In reality they [Google] have a great product. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say ‘I’m going to shut down my Yahoo Mail or Gmail account’. Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out people will start to say this is how the future should work,” Zuckerberg added.

 

This is the biggest product that Facebook has ever undertaken, according to the company, with every one of its more than half a billion users going to be offered a @facebook.com email address.