Right now, the Facebook Inbox is a catch-all for many different types of messages: personal messages from individual friends, message blasts sent to Groups, Events, and Friend Lists, and Facebook public profile “updates.” Because all of that can get unwieldy, Facebook is about to release new filters to make it easier to manage messages sent yo your Facebook Inbox. Here’s how it will look:

As you can see, Inbox filters have now been moved to the left side of the page to match the Facebook home page. Other notes:

• Notifications, currently a tab within the Facebook Inbox, have been removed.
• Updates from public profiles remain in a separate view from personal messages. Facebook engineer Scott Marlette, who’s been working on the new features, says blasts from Groups and Events will be moved into the “Updates” folder over time as well.
• Public profile update subscriptions will be able to be managed directly from the inbox.
• Entering any keywords into the search box will return all messages containing those keywords in real time.

Facebook hasn’t announced whether or not users will be able to send messages to each other using their Facebook username. For now, Facebook will be using the same UI for choosing friends to send messages to.

The new inbox is currently in testing, and will be rolled out to more users in the “coming weeks,” Facebook says.