Facebook About to Roll Out New Inbox Filters to Decrease Clutter

June 18th, 2009

By Justin Smith

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:

facebookinbox

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.

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4 Responses to “Facebook About to Roll Out New Inbox Filters to Decrease Clutter”

goog wave Says:
June 19th, 2009 at 12:03 am
If fb message is between 3 or more users it is same as goog wave. fb messaging already allows to attach media content like photos, videos, polls etc.

fb inbox still lacks feature to separate messages from friends or those from non-friends.
Jakub Pajer Says:
June 19th, 2009 at 1:41 am
good way, keep on… still no chance how to differentiate between friends and nonfrineds messages
Facebook quiere ser Google y la llegada del social CRM — El blog de Javier Godoy Says:
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:27 pm
[...] ello estaba cuando ya de paso se ha puesto a mejorar el sistema de correo. Ambas cosas, tambien hay que decirlo, necesitaban una mano de pintura, y aunque no fuera para [...]
Facebook Platform Launches New Inbox, Notification APIs Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
[...] top of the Facebook Inbox, even if in “read-only” mode. Facebook is in the process of adding more features to the Inbox now, but the new version is only open to a few test users [...]