Technology has brought us to a place that was hard to imagine just a couple of decades ago. With email being the preferred method of spreading information amongst those in the business of online marketing, there really hasn’t been anything better to com along and shake things up. These days, the social media empire Facebook has begun the process of rolling out a new email system. Will this spell the end for email marketing as we know it? The answers may surprise you.

For a long time now, Facebook users have had the pleasure of connecting with friends and family over great distances, but still needing to turn to their email client for the really important stuff. Somewhere in the last three years, marketers started making use of the social media platform to connect buyers with sellers, and a new innovation was born.

Twitter has also become a launchpad for a number of companies that wish to express themselves directly to followers, through a medium that can often be perceived as much more instant and “wired” than email, although email operates on the same technology as any other Internet-driven messaging service.

Now that every marketer in the know is adding friends and tweeting their company’s message to everyone who will listen, it seems that the logical conclusion would be to merge email and social media into one package.

Facebook Messages, the new email system that tightly integrates with their existing social network of individual profiles and sites around the world, will be available as a way to manage the flow of information between users who want to make use of Facebook’s vast archives, and 500 million-user database.

This new messaging system combines the attributes of text messages, instant messaging and e-mail, with some experts already bemoaning the impending death of email marketing.

What’s the big deal? Everyone already has email, and Facebook is not going to replace the email address… or is it? The outlook is that Facebook will not be replacing traditional email, but that’s where the line becomes blurry. Facebook is offering its users an interface that has no ordinary subject lines, nor will users be required to cc or bcc other users on their thread. In a sense, this is everything Google Wave and Buzz wanted to be, but with the momentum of Facebook’s enormous user community already behind it.

The plan is to keep your friends in a “friends” folder, and everyone else in the “other” folder. While some retailers and specialists are not thrilled with this idea, it presents a real opportunity to those who are willing to invest more of themselves to their customers.

Rather than worry about email addresses getting out, and spammers clogging up inboxes with rubbish, users are now going to find themselves with a new form of message control that was never quite available before.

The “like” button may gain a greater role in bringing marketers closer to their targets, as this will become a strong identifier for users who see their friends and others within their personal networks giving the virtual thumbs-up to products and services that wouldn’t even show up unless somebody already gave it a nod of approval.

Experts are also saying that retailers and online marketers should not expect to see this new development from Facebook affect holiday sales for 2010, since the technology is too new to be fully implemented by most users, and will undoubtedly be in a period of observation by users who are less likely to get onboard at a moment’s notice.

It’s also not expected that users will simply switch their email addresses over to a Facebook address, because email is still going to be a trusted and comfortable method of sending important messages, and because some countries – like China – have put an indefinite ban on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and to some degree MySpace… which eliminates the possibility of those users ever seeing what the new messaging system has to offer.

Some experts are also pointing out the need for marketers to do a better job of not only measuring the click behavior of email users, but also determining the behavior of market segments with regard to which addresses are getting traffic in the first place, and which ones remain inactive.