What messages do you want see in your Facebook Messages inbox? The social network hopes to answer, or at least better understand, that question with two releases: brand-new message filtering options for your inbox and a way to pay to ensure your messages are delivered to someone’s inbox.

Facebook announced Thursday that it was tweaking the Facebook Messages inbox experience to better ensure that relevant messages get to your inbox, as opposed to being dumped into the “Other” folder, which is Facebook’s equivalent of the spam folder.

The new inbox filters, which are rolling out globally, are Facebook’s way of correcting a broken system. The company currently routes messages to your inbox or other folder based on your settings, but it has found that it pushes too many “high signal” messages (read as: messages you probably want) to your Other folder, where they likely go unseen. To fix the problem, Facebook has created two filters, basic and strict, that will allow certain types of messages to reach your inbox that otherwise would not.

If you opt for the basic filter, Facebook will deliver “mostly messages from friends and people you may know” to your inbox. This means that messages from friends and friends of friends will go straight to your inbox. The strict filter is, well, stricter. Select this if you “mostly” want to receive messages from friends.

Both options, however, use the “mostly” terminology to allow for instances when Facebook puts its algorithmic magic to work and determines that a high signal message should get through. What’s a high signal message? One that comes from a Facebook Messenger for Android user who is not your friend but has your number, or an event invitation from someone you don’t know when the invite is going out to some of your mutual friends. Messages from a friend who emails your @facebook.com address will also get delivered.

There’s one additional high signal type of message that can get through to your inbox beginning today — but the signal in question is payment. Facebook is kicking off a small test in the U.S. that will let people you are not friends with pay a small fee to send messages directly to your inbox. The fee will vary, as it’s just a test, but prices start at $1 per message. The theory is that the fee will serve as a solid indicator that this message is important.

“The test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient,” Facebook said in a blog post. “For example, if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their inbox.”

A Facebook spokesperson would not provide additional guidance on the pay-to-deliver test, other than to add that you’ll only be able to receive one paid-for message in your inbox each week.

Facebook photo via Shutterstock

The social network today launched a new version of Messages with cosmetic and under-the-hood improvements designed to make a person’s Facebook inbox a more appropriate place for speedy web and mobile exchanges.

With the new version of Messages, Facebook has made it clear that intends to make the product a full-fledged replacement for email.

“We know how to scale email,” Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure Jay Parikh said in a meeting with the press today. “This is a scaling problem that’s well understood for two decades now. From a perspective of comparing that to what we’re doing, you’ll see that we’ve had to innovate around how to make that real-time and dynamic for our users.”

Messages now sports a two-paned layout. The inbox lists all messages on the left while simultaneously showing a full view of selected conversation threads on the right (as pictured below). People can also add multiple photos and emoticons to messages.

And, just like Gmail and other popular email clients, you can now use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the inbox. Facebook also lets you search by a sender’s name or keyword from the main messages view.

A small team of Facebook engineers also worked to dramatically improve the reliability, flexibility, and speed of Messages.

“With this update, it works a lot faster, it’s easier to consume things quickly. We’re trying to make everything fast,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Photo credit: zilverbat./Flickr

The social networking company credits this design with fueling the rapid growth of Photos (which is now the most popular photo-sharing application on the Web) and Groups (which Zuckerberg called one of Facebook’s fastest-growing products ever). But this approach can lead to some awkward situations, like when a friend tags you in an embarrassing photo or ropes you into an inappropriate group.

Zuckerberg pointed out that you can just un-tag the photo or leave the group. Interviewer John Battelle described that approach as one that “doesn’t ask for permission, it asks for forgiveness.”

“The friend relationship is manual,” Zuckerberg replied. In other words, Facebook asks for permission before you approve someone as your friend, and that permission gives them “the right to do certain things.” The implicit solution: If you don’t like what a friend is doing, then you should un-friend them.

That was basically my response to the Groups complaints, but it will be harder for Facebook users who approve any and every friend request that comes in. So this seems like another way in which the company is designing its services so that Facebook connections reflect real-world connections, rather than a willy-nilly approach to random friend acceptance.

You can see that in yesterday’s launch of a new version of Facebook Messages. One of the reporters at the press conference noted that by prioritizing any message sent by a Facebook friend, the company seemed to be discouraging people from making new friends on Facebook. Director of engineering Andrew Bosworth responded: Yep, pretty much.

“I don’t think the goal of Facebook was ever to expand the social graph,” Bosworth said.

[photo by Dean Takahashi]

Take, for example, its announcement that it had recently revamped its AOL Mail system as part of an overall makeover of the company’s products. It might have seen like a thunder-stealing move to unveil the new AOL Mail on Sunday, amid heavy buzz about a planned Facebook announcement Monday — had Facebook not revealed a messaging service that extends far beyond email.

The full AOL product will be released early next year, but interested users can sign up to request an invitation to the beta version today, said the company.

Dubbed Project Phoenix, the new AOL Mail has helped itself to some of Gmail’s more popular features–it lets you “star” messages or rank them by importance, as well as providing a simple, easy-to-read navigation bar at the top. It has a streamlined look that is a far cry from its traditionally busy design, with the aforementioned Quick Bar at the top of the page letting AOL’s users create texts, emails and instant messages quickly and easily.

It also now allows users to aggregate all their email in one place, linking all of a users’ other email addresses to their AOL account. Most importantly, perhaps, it has ways for users to shed their aol.com addresses for newer, perhaps less square, ones, such as wow.com, games.com, ygm.com and love.com.

A Smart View sidebar lets them keep content like photos or attachments in unopened messages, even if they’ve given them a quick glance to see what they contain, while you can now have several messages up and open at once without overshadowing the inbox.

In addition to keeping it competitive with faster, more nimble competitors like Google and Facebook, revamping their mail feature is crucial to the company’s bottom line: AOL said in a statement that AOL Mail still accounts for as much as 45 percent of the pageviews on the network.

“Email remains one of the most vital communication tools despite all of the new sites and apps available to consumers today,” said Brad Garlinghouse, president of AOL’s Consumer Applications Group. “There is still so much innovation to be done in the space and Project Phoenix is just the beginning.”

Still, despite AOL’s enthusiasm about the project, it is clear that the changes made through the hopefully named Phoenix are largely predictable, cosmetic and long overdue.

The new features also showed very little of the inventiveness and agility displayed today by its younger, far hipper rival Facebook — proving AOL obviously has a long way to go before it can convince an increasingly sophisticated user base that it isn’t your mother’s dial-up web connection anymore.

The company describes this as an attempt to consolidate different kinds of online messaging, starting with email, SMS text messages, Facebook messages, and instant messages. Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth noted that currently, when you want to reach someone, you usually choose different communication methods for each person — you may have one friend who prefers receiving text messages, while your grandmother might only respond to emails.

With Facebook Messages, you shouldn’t have to think about that stuff anymore. You just send a message to the person you want to reach, then they receive that message through the medium of their choice. You can manage those messages on the Facebook site itself, or have them forwarded to email, sent to your instant messaging account, or sent via text message as needed.

“It should feel like a conversation,” Bosworth said. So if you need to step away from your desk during an IM conversation, you don’t have to tell them, “Be right back.” Instead, you step away and just continue the conversation via text message.

Facebook isn’t just consolidating communication media. Facebook Messages also ditches the idea of email threads grouped by subject. Instead, all of your conversations with someone show up in a single thread, which could theoretically contain the entire history of your communication with someone.

Facebook is also using your contact list to prioritize your emails. Messages are grouped into three areas — “messages”, “other”, and “junk”. Messages come from your Facebook friends, “other” comes from folks who aren’t friends, and junk contains the messages that are flagged by the spam filter. Users will be able to shift contacts into different groups. So if you’ve agreed to be friends with thousands of people, you don’t have to prioritize messages from all of them.

The company will be gradually rolling this out over several months. (I’m part of the first wave of outside users, so I’ll probably write a post this afternoon outlining my impressions.) As part of the rollout, users will be able to activate Facebook.com email addresses. Despite that feature, and despite speculation about the service as a “Gmail killer”, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said, “This is not an email killer.”

You can read more details in Facebook’s blog post.

Social networking titan Facebook announced today that it is embedding Microsoft’s online versions of its Office applications into the Facebook messaging service.

Microsoft’s step into Facebook is less of a grab at the collaboration space and more like another jab at Google. Things have been tense between Google and Facebook since the search giant blocked users from importing Google contacts into other applications. That included Facebook, which then returned the volley by asking users to simply download a file that included contact information and then upload it to Facebook.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has jumped in bed with Facebook at Google’s expense. Google executives have complained that too much data is locked up inside Facebook and hidden from search engines, a situation exacerbated (from Google’s perspective) by Facebook’s decision to share some of that social data with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which competes directly with Google. Most recently, Bing and Facebook announced a partnership that would allow Bing to return results based on the Facebook “likes” of a user’s friends.

Microsoft brought all of its Office applications online in response to Google’s increasingly popular web document applications. Google doesn’t provide details about how Docs is doing, but it says the app has “tens of millions of users.” And Google Apps, the bundle of business tools that includes Docs, has signed up 2 million companies with more than 25 million users total. Google Docs gives small- to mid-sized businesses with employees strewn across the country a powerful free option for collaboration. The alternative Microsoft offered before release of its Office 365 suite was paying for its Sharepoint program, a file-sharing and collaboration tool that integrates with its Office suite.

If Microsoft were looking to challenge Google in the business collaboration space, it would go after a networking application like Yammer, a social network like Facebook for businesses. But there’s a strong statement that Microsoft could make here with the high school and college student presence on Facebook. I know I used Google Docs and Facebook all the time — and combining the two of them would have shaved a few precious minutes off working on that ten-page term paper.

Either way, this is good news for the collaboration space and just about everyone else. Businesses can cross their fingers and hope to see office application integration — on either Google’s or Microsoft’s end — in other enterprise collaboration services. It also means more fireworks between Google and Facebook. Be sure to grab a bag of popcorn.

[Photo: Marianne Perdomo]

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It turns out the answer is yes. Today, at a press conference announcing the social network’s new messaging service, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Fb.com is Facebook’s new corporate email domain.

Previously, if you wanted to email a Facebook employee, you would reach them at a name@facebook.com address. However, Facebook is now including Facebook.com email addresses as part of its new service — for example, I will be able to claim anthonyha@facebook.com.

“This was a big discussion internally,” Zuckerberg said, because a lot of employees are “really tied to their Facebook.com email address.” At the same time, including Facebook.com addresses seemed like an important part of the new service. So Facebook’s workforce will just have to suffer through moving their corporate emails to fb.com.

By the way, this seems like another sign that Facebook doesn’t expect the new messaging service to completely replace email.

Facebook just announced the new messaging service that the tech press has been speculating about as a “Gmail killer” — but the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that’s actually the wrong way to think about it.

“This is not an email-killer,” he said of the offering, called Facebook Messages. “This is a messaging system that includes email as one part of it.”

The new Facebook feature allows people to receive SMS text messages, instant messages, email, and Facebook messaging through the Facebook website, or on another service of their choice. (I’ll be publishing another post shortly with more details of how this works.) Zuckerberg said this system should feel simpler and more natural than email, but he added that he doesn’t expect people to abandon email, especially not right away. Instead, users, especially younger users, who already do most of their communication in Facebook (and other non-email systems) will start shifting to this system more and more over time.

Zuckerberg also talked specifically about Google’s Gmail product, since Facebook’s new product has been talked about as a way for Facebook to compete against Google. Zuckerberg described Gmail as “a really good product” and repeated that he doesn’t expect users to delete their Gmail accounts. After all, you can use the new Facebook Messages with Gmail.

Update: You can read my overview of the new Facebook Messages here.

Front photo via Andrew Feinberg