BetterBizComm

At Facebook, Dot Com

According to this Forbes article, Facebook’s latest novelties will not only be the college kid’s playground, but a boon for companies as well.  Gone are the days, says Forbes, when employees would block workers’ access to social networks. Integrated networks like Facebook may very well be the language of business communications.

What are these novelties? On November 15, Facebook announced that it will soon launch an upgrade of its messaging service, Facebook Messages. This new and improved communication platform will merge the most popular communication media: Facebook Messages, SMS, chat and email.

This allows a live conversation to happen through a juggling of any of these media. If you’re a fan of SMS, for instance, you can reply to a Message using your phone, directly to the inbox of the sender. The inbox, soon to be the ‘Social Inbox,’ will act as a ‘net,’ trapping any sort of message sent or received. The Facebook Message may become Every Message.

That’s not all. Facebook will give an @facebook.com email address to everyone who wants one, whether they have a Facebook profile or not. @facebook.com  will also be merged with the Social Inbox.

Many predict that if Facebook can match the functionality of email clients like Gmail, it will give the Hotmails and the Gmails a run for their money. On a similar vein, Gartner says 20% of workers will use social networks as their preferred vehicle for business communications by 2014.

The Facebook blog claims that the idea behind Messages is to tear down barriers to communication. If there is something worth saying, the message should reach its recipient right away, unimpeded by something as technical as the recipient not currently being online on MSN messenger, or not checking their Yahoo!mail often enough.

Perhaps the idea beneath this idea is that Facebook wants to ensure that people’s attention is on Facebook, all the time, everywhere.

For a change.