Fmail: Facebook and its new messaging system

Last week Facebook announced that it will be rolling out a new way for its users to send messages and communicate with one another.  According to Mark Zuckerburg, more than 4 billion messages are sent through Facebook each day.  This staggering statistic led Facebook to capitalize on this activity by optimizing its messaging system in a way that would allow users to send seamless messages, enable cross platform conversation history and a utilize a social inbox to filter messages so one can communicate with the most important people in their community.

While Facebook is out issuing Facebook email addresses, the real question we should be asking ourselves is how much will this impact usage within the site?  According to Mashable, the average user spends 5 hours and 46 minutes a month on Facebook, which is actually triple the amount of time they spent on Google.  With the advent of F-mail, site usage is bound to enormously increase,  which means over time Google and Gmail could become obsolete, though unlikely.  Whatever the case, the race to make user communication more efficient and personal is growing faster, and regardless of who wins the party that comes out on top is us, the consumers.