I know I posted about @facebook.com email address‘ last weekend, but I didn’t quite forsee what they had planned.

Facebook messages wants to be a hub for your messaging, specifically a hub for messages sent between you and your friends. It will also be simple, quick messages, like chat. They say that pressing “enter” will send the message, but I’ll be interested to see how that actually works in the real world. There appears to be some “magic” going on behind the scenes so that when you send a friend a message they will receive it on an appropriate device (like a phone via SMS, by email or as a facebook message or IM). This part isn’t clearly explained on the Facebook blog post about the new service. They have mentioned that, if you want it, you will get your Facebook username as your email account name, for example the URL to my facebook profile is http://www.facebook.com/joe.barnett which means I could claim the joe.barnett@facebook.com email address once it becomes available.

Now that I know a little more about it, Facebook isn’t trying to own web based email, they are emphasizing your “friend network”, and how much work you’ve put into creating that network on Facebook. By default the messages you see in Messages are only those that you are friends with on Facebook. This is a really slick move by Facebook, as you’ll be able to use different email accounts and messaging services, but Facebook wants to own the contact list of friends you’ve put together. Facebook recently announced that you would be able to download all of your content from Facebook in a big zip file, what they didn’t mention in that was that you wouldn’t be able to download your contact list, and it’s not something you can export (which is why Google stopped allowing Facebook to use the GMail api to get the names of your friends).

Facebook is really making a play to stay in the game as the main social networking website, they’ve made it stick so far, and it will be interesting to see if they can stick around. (Unlike MySpace or Friendster).