MySpace One Ups Facebook With Google Gears Messaging

Last week at the Google I/O conference MySpace made a significant announcement about integration of their messaging platform with Google Gears to enable searching and sorting of messages. For the longest time, I have been writing that Facebook needs to update their messaging system to make it easier to search and sort through. With the help of Google gears, MySpace has made this type of sorting and searching a reality.

Last week Mike Arrington sugested that MySpace has over 170 million messages sent every day on the service. With some users suffering inbox fatigue, the service has been immediately released for users with at least 5,000 messages in their inbox. Over the coming weeks and months this threshold will be lowered to enable more users to take advantage of the new service.

For those of you that think in code, MySpace has also posted their presentation from last week’s Google I/O conference. This announcement also highlights the strong relationship between Google and MySpace who are both trying to compete with Facebook. While I have yet to use the new message integration, based on the video below, it appears to be a slick application. The only question now is why hasn’t Facebook updated their messaging system?