WebProNews

While it was (presumably) nice to see that you’d received new messages on Facebook, it wasn’t too helpful that the social network’s email notifications stopped there; from your email account, you’d need to head over to the Facebook site to read the actual notes.  No longer, though - Facebook’s now passing the messages along.

Is your ex-girlfriend sending a Christmas greeting or a wish-you-would-die rant?  Thanks to this development, you can know immediately!  Or, for more mundane matters, tell if someone’s just “LOL”ing to conclude a conversation or has asked another series of questions to which you’ll need to respond.

On that note comes one significant issue - you’ll need to sign into the social network to send a proper Facebook message back.  It seems possible to send an email by just hitting the standard “reply” button, however, and we’ll give Facebook credit for sacrificing a number of page views, either way.

Meanwhile, MySpace and other social networks are looking even more dated than they did before, and Michael Arrington, to whom I owe a hat tip, called Facebook’s step forward “great . . . frickin wonderful, even.”  So the social network’s phenomenal growth should continue into the foreseeable future.