Modern Messaging With Facebook

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of a new modern messaging system. With this new feature, you can send messages to your friends that will appear as mobile-phone text messages, e-mails or instant messages, based on the preferences you set for each friend. The way Facebook currently works, you receive alerts with your e-mail account when your friends post a photo or comment on your Facebook wall.

Facebook will give all users an “@facebook.com” e-mail address.

“This is not an e-mail killer,” Zuckerberg says. “Maybe we can help push the way people do messaging more toward a simple, real-time, immediate personal experience.” He also says that currently about 4 billion messages are sent through Facebook every day. Zuckerberg believes that modern messaging should be seamless, informal, immediate, personal and minimal. “It’s not e-mail,” he emphasizes.

This new messaging system is composed of three parts: seamless messaging, cross-platform conversation history and the social inbox. It incorporates e-mails, Facebook messages, SMS, other chat clients and possibly VoIP in the future. Instead of having a single e-mail here and there, every time you talk to someone it will become part of a stream of information.

The Messages feature is built for communicating with your friends, so it’s organized primarily around people. All of your messages will be together in one place, whether they’re sent over chat, e-mail or SMS – all your conversation history is easily viewable with a single conversation.

With the Social Inbox, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into another folder, where you can look at them separately. You also can change your account settings to be limited and bounce any e-mails that aren’t exclusively from your friends.

Facebook didn’t give a specific date on when this will be launched, but did say that Messages and the e-mail addresses will be launched gradually over the next few months. Once you receive your invitation, you can get started and also invite your friends to join you.

Click Chick’s Mobile App of the Week: Black Flyday

With Black Friday happening in a few days, you’ll want to be sure to find all the greatest deals and share them with your friends. Black Flyday is an app exclusively for Android phones that enables you bargain-hunters to know the exact whereabouts of those Black Friday deals within a certain radius, and in real time.

Black Flyday helps you by maintaining communication with your Facebook friends and deal-hunting team members, while at the same time providing you with a comprehensive and global-view setting of particular shopping deals within a pre-set perimeter. So, the more people who use the app around you, the more beneficial it is for all of you.

A couple of the app’s highlights include the “deal scroller” and the map. The scroller scrolls all deals within your desired radius or friend network that may have otherwise been missed. The map shows the location of other “Black Flyers” so you can see and take advantage of the deals they’re buzzing about.

Black Flyday is a free download through Black Friday from the Android Market, Iconosys.com, BlackFlyday.com or Payloadz.com. After Black Friday it will be $9.99 for full lifetime coverage to send deals to your friends all year round.