Who uses Facebook Messages?  Party promoters.  That’s right.  I’m hoping Facebook changes this spam problem with the updates it’s rolling out today, which center around filtering messages based on your relationships.  Classic Facebook.  We’ll see how well it works.

At Facebook’s live event today, nostalgia gets digital, with the launch of the new Facebook mail.  You’ll get a Facebook email address, and a highly contextualized version of Facebook conversations.  It’s required a complete restructuring of Facebook’s messaging system, but it could be well worth it (especially for Facebook).

It’s based off Hbase, a new Hadoop system, and built a new system around it.  The main points of Facebook’s new messaging system are Seamless Messaging, Conversation History, and Social Inbox.  It boils down to a new filtered inbox, organized a bit differently than Google’s recently launched Priority Inbox.  Folders are included in the new release, for some manual organization options.

Inside the Facebook "War Room." Photo credit: Robert Scoble.

What the new message threads will look like will be more like an ongoing conversation (like private Friendship Pages?), with an increased level of user control.  You’ll be able to limit how far that message gets spread around, based on your privacy settings.  It’s an interesting use of Facebook’s Social Graph, and very indicative of what the social network is looking to do with its system in the long haul.

File-sharing is also included in the update, so you can attach more than just photos when you send a message to a Facebook friend.  In Facebook’s attempt to make email more real-time (per the younger demographics’ requests), there are more than a few characteristics of IM and SMS looped into this release.

That’s only the beginning, though, as Facebook has plans to loop in text and IM messages into this new threaded concept.  The idea is to archive relationships, and all the content therein, instead of having so many conversations spread across devices and accounts.  To that end, Facebook has plans to sync with other email systems, its mobile apps and more.

I’m anxious to play around with the new messaging system, as Facebook messages have nearly lost all value to me personally.  The new FB messages are starting out as private beta, by invite only, with goals to roll out the new system over the coming months.  One thing this new system will certainly need is a heady search tool around this new archival organization, an area Google has mastered with Gmail.