Email is soon going to be a thing of the past. This is a prediction that Facebook is willing to bet on, as it launched a new messaging system on Monday.

During the launch, the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said that the world was moving on to more real-time methods of communicating such as texting and instant messaging.

The new messaging system has seen an overhaul done on the social website’s message inbox which worked much in the same way as an email inbox. The new version incorporates features such as mobile phone texts, IM chat as well as access to emails from non-facebook users. Facebook email addresses will also be offered to interested users. In addition, the messages will be in one inbox and the user can then organize them depending on preference.

Due to the socially interactive nature of Facebook, the company plans to use this fact to build social inboxes which will be able to spam out messages that are deemed unimportant or impersonal messages like bills. There will also be a feature allowing users to block messages that are sent from people who are not their friends on Facebook.

This system will be rolled out to users by way of invitation in coming months.

This latest innovation has intensified the battle between facebook and its competitors, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft. While Gmail, a market leader in email has countered Facebook’s popularity with the introduction of socially interactive features such as chat and phone calls, Yahoo and AOL are working on encompassing Facebook and Twitter into their main email systems.

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