Facebook will create a new unified communications platform where you can get all your correspondence into one inbox.
Known as the social inbox, it will store emails, voice messages from phones, chat messages and SMS, and is to be rolled out gradually over the next few months.
The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the social inbox would unify communications by making them more "seamless, immediate, personal, simple and minimal."
He contends that many of the new generation of internet users don’t like email because it is too slow. Imagine that! If people increasingly find email too slow then the letter is definitely going to die out.
Facebook always has it ear to the ground for new trends and after discussion of a new Facebook phone this will integrate communications on another level.
Indeed while UC platforms like Microsoft Lync server allow you to access all these communications and more, the idea of a social inbox is one that they might like and take time to expand upon.
However there are many pitfalls for this product. First all of Facebook has gained a reputation for disregarding privacy, especially after the recent automatic tagging fiasco.
Secondly many people will ask whether they really need all their communications into one inbox. Will it save that much time or will it just be unnecessarily confusing?
Not that I use Facebook anymore, but I am a big fan of Gmail and even if I was a Facebook user I doubt I could be persuaded to switch provider.
Gmail provides an ideal way to deal with both business and personal correspondence whereas Facebook does not have that professional feel. I still think Facebook is great for social media purposes but having worked in an office where they decided on prospective employees by Facebooking them, I know that it is a dangerous tool.
Facebook may be right to embrace unified communications, but users will have to decide whether they trust Facebook to handle all of their correspondence.
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