Yesterday Facebook announced their redesign of messaging, with the focus being on the rethink of how we communicate today. It consists of a redesign of their current messaging system, but also the availability of Facebook email addresses. And it looks pretty ambitious…

Today our communication is rather fragmented – we have multiple email addresses, multiple IM accounts which are active at different times, we SMS, we MMS, we do phone calls and also use VoIP solutions like Skype. Facebook is hoping to aggregate some of these communication channels into one feed on Facebook, which will enable users to keep track of threaded conversations. So if you IM’d, emailed and SMS’d someone, theoretically they should all drop in the same conversation history.

Facebook is also trying to blur the line between email and IM – messages will be instantaneous, and the recipient will be notified immediately, with the option to reply as well. Another great feature is the “Social Inbox” – which will contain only messages from your Facebook friends, while excluding messages from outside. You can of course also add and remove senders from this social inbox – and it ought to be much more accurate than Gmail‘s priority inbox.

Overall it looks very impressive – but only time will tell whether people will actually shift to Facebook for their communication. Currently it is being rolled out slowly, but if you want to to get an invite earlier – you can request it here.

So do you think you can switch from email to Facebook?