Facebook Announces Chat Heads Messaging Service

We're here at Facebook's phone event, where they just announced Facebook Home, a new home screen of sorts built for Android devices. The company is going a little deeper in depth on some of the new features, one of which is a new messaging system called Chat Heads, which essentially allows you to message your Facebook friends in a new way.

Facebook Chat Heads works in any app that you're in, so if someone messages you while you're playing around in another app, a "chat head" will pop up in the corner, letting you know that you received a message from this friend of yours. From there you can tap on the head to reply to the message.

Facebook addresses the problems with messaging on smartphones today, including the fact messaging is treated like "just another app." This means that you're switching between apps, which can become really annoying. Facebook notes that you should be talking to people, not apps.

You can also move the picture around to different parts of the screen, and when you're done with the conversation, you can toss it off the screen to get it out of your way. It looks pretty slick, and really easy to use at that.