According to Facebook about 350 million of its 500 million members already use their messaging technology, sending more than four billion messages daily. Facebook's relentless push towards 1 billion users will prove fertile ground for their new interpretation of email and will pitch them against the likes of Hotmail (362million users), Yahoo! (273million), Gmail (193million).

With Facebook Messages, users will be able receive messages and hold real time conversation through whatever medium or device they choose. Facebook are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one and say that that their users can now share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not.

Facebook have said the thought behind the latest initiative is that traditional email is too slow and cumbersome and needs to step into the modern world of messaging. However, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been at pains to stress that Facebook Messages is not a traditional email service telling reporters in San Francisco that "this is not an email killer." There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. The model they say more closely resembles that of their existing chat function and offers to reduce the number of things you need to do to send a message.

Part of the appeal of the new Facebook offering is the intelligence of the inbox that overcomes what many see as a flaw of traditional email whereby a message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but for the user some are more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

At the launch event Zuckerberg described his vision of the future of email as being seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. He said the new service is centered around three ideas: social messaging, conversation history and a social inbox.

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