With 'Messages,' Facebook tries to run the switchboard

Facebook introduced a major upgrade to the social network's messaging system, now called "Messages," that's designed to fold in other, older forms of electronic text communication: chat, e-mail and SMS.

Yes, you can have a facebook.com e-mail address, based on the user name you choose for your profile on the site. The idea, however, is not just to give you yet another e-mail account but also to unify the ways you can converse with other Facebook users and flatten some perceived hang-ups with e-mail:

• "Seamless Messaging" (meaning a unified view of your e-mail, Facebook messages and texts),
• "Conversation History" (allowing you to trace a lifelong conversation across those different channels) and
• "Social Inbox" (using Facebook's knowledge of who your friends are to filter your incoming traffic).

The idea is that Facebook will act as a switchboard, routing incoming and outgoing messages - it already knows your other-mail addresses and your mobile phone number as well as the corresponding contact info for your friends. It's promising access via the IMAP standard, which would let you download your messages in any e-mail program. But for now it's a feature that lives mainly on Facebook's own site and its mobile applications, if you've been invited to try it at the start of what Facebook says will be a slow rollout.