Facebook introduced Monday a three-pronged system that strives to make communication more efficient, more personal, and simpler, based on the “social inbox,” a place where messages are housed and filtered. It will roll out over the next couple of months.

Because Facebook already knows who your “friends” are, it can filter messages that it believes to be important to you. The idea is that users should be able to have an IM appear as an SMS or an SMS appear as an email, for example.