We’ve known since June that Facebook was going to revamp its inbox, which has been one of the social network’s real weaknesses. Today, the new inbox appears to be rolling live for some users.
And you can see, the changes are a little different than some of the ones previewed two months ago. But as expected, there’s a more obvious way to jump between the inbox, updates and sent messages. It is also much easier to filter out which emails are unread versus the ones that you’ve already seen. Perhaps most notably, the composition box for a new message is an overlay rather than a new window, which is much nicer. The threaded discussions for actual messages has also been significantly cleaned up and now look more like the News Feed, complete with the square-shaped icons.
We haven’t had a chance to test it yet (it’s only beginning to roll out to users), but I would assume that the search functionality has been upgraded as well, alongside with the recent upgrade to Facebook’s regular search functionality. Facebook rival MySpace also recently overhauled its inbox in an effort to get it up to par not just with other social networks, but with the big boys like Yahoo Mail and Gmail.
Below find some screenshots.
Event spam never looked so good.
The reason FB is doing this is not for cute incremental UI stuff – its a major strategy to do a full email service. That’s why ‘vanity’ names were doled out so I’ll have ‘milener@facebook.com’, that’s why they bought FFeed, to get Bucheit who built Gmail.
FBook needs to answer Myspace’s email product. Email is very sticky and drives tons of traffic.
where is the sexy part of this?
the fact that it’s not that old awful system where i have to load a new slow page to send a message.
i never did…
Exactly. Where is the sexy part in this? Facebook and other social networking websites are never meant to be truly functional in terms of sending Mails; search functionalities; message archiving; labels – all that GMail offers can never be replicated in a Facebook environment.
Agree…I’ve never had a problem with it.
Looks like a proper inbox to me.
Sexy? That’s what you make of it (or those who spam you)
I’m not seeing this in my facebook acct?
I love the editing of your inbox..
Presume this will be available in the UK around mid-September
These guys are competing with GMail hardcore. Just wait until you can have your Facebook mail address
why would a fb email even by necessary?
Hmmm… Would b gd if Facebook gave its users email addresses, would make it sooo much easier to check emails!
sexy huh? its a word, just not the right one.
looks ‘adequately useful at last’ would be more like it.
Um, sexy? how about titillating? intriguing . . . provocative . . .appetizing . . .yeah . . .no . . .
sexy is just so relative . . .But I AM glad that FB is revamping that dang inbox. It is clunky.
Pretty cool but it’s not like this is any competition for Wave. I’d love to see a Wave competitor done by Facebook since all of my friends are on Facebook. It would take years to bring them to Wave.
calling this sexy is pure brain spam
I recognize that avatar. Looks like the MG’s have been talking.
wow, there’s ads on facebook??????
god bless a.b.p.
Sexy? Attention-grabbing title yes, truthful, no.
Come on now.
umm sexy!?
By the way I still cant find my way around facebook. Maybe work on that!
well you’re just stupid…. like… there’s no way around it dude. if you can’t navigate facebook you are just an ass. haha.
This is news? Seems pretty lame to me.
Chris
Lame… facebook connect users that is..
Lame…Facebook sux. They should fire their CPO
Ok, so facebook are trying to re-vamp their image in order to win back fan base that has moved onto the likes of twitter. Surely the real answer for the social media giant is to launch their new product ‘facebook lite’, with its simplified approach it should certainly appeal to the masses of twitter converts!
The sexy thing is that you can reply with a video IMHO.
I agree =)
The only thing sexy about the screen shot is the Blondie in your inbox
How do you make the message textarea larger if you’re submitting anything that is longer than the textbox provided?
It looks ok, but is it more usable?
They’ll never seriously compete with email until they let you attach files. I think at the point we may start to see facebook seriously start to dip into Gmail and YahooMail’s market share. This could get interesting.
Watch out Gmail…..
Facebook email, can never replace Gmail. May be they can offer additional feature to its members.
Gmail is super cool in its features Facebook can never come next to it.
never say never. i said social networking would never take off years ago…. oops. i said twitter was the stupidest thing ever after making an account when it was first introduced. i said it would never make it. i said facebook was a fad and would never last- esp against the likes of myspace (which was the coolest thing ever back then). so. yeah. i’ve learned never to say never. just sit back and enjoy the show. =]
i have the new facebook inbox and its SHIT!!!
if i could i would go back to the old one in a second!!
you cant get to ur notifications page, see which messages are new. its the OPPOSITE to sexy cus the text is all big and ugly!! a shit little pop up comes when you wanna compose a new message. worst update yet