Lots of commentary on the web today regarding Facebook’s new Messaging product….

Generally speaking…

Some of the more interesting stats to come out of all of this : 4 billion messages sent daily, used by 350 million facebook users. Unsurprisingly, the new Messaging platform will be available on facebook.com as well as their mobile apps, so we can expect an updated iphone app in the near future.

Generally speaking the goal of this new product is to consolidate all of your text messages, by merging Facebook messages, email, SMS, and IM. The core concepts at play in Facebook Messaging are the following:

  1. A Social inbox (a unified store)
  2. Seamless messaging (send/reply to multiple types of messages)
  3. Conversation history (all conversations are kept)

For developers…

So there will be an early beta for a read API for the new messaging system, open to registered devs. Currently there’s some api documentation available
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/thread. Note that this is a read-only API – devs cannot send messages to @facebook.com addresses. Apparently you need an extended permission set, read_mailbox, which is set just like any other extended permission:

Read mailbox extended permission

I’ve tried calling it with a valid acces_token however and got this back as a result 

{
   "error": {
      "type": "MessagingException",
      "message": "Service Unavailable: Unfortunately, we cannot currently access your messages.  Please try again later."
   }
}

Gotta love betas