Finally, all of those e-mail notifications you get from Facebook might become useful, as it appears that the social network is testing functionality that lets you reply to status updates (and conversations you’re involved with via others’ updates) via e-mail.
The feature’s not enabled for everyone yet, but DownloadSquad has seen it and says “it works seamlessly and it’s fast.” We’ve contacted Facebook to try and get some more details on when it’s being rolled out to more users, and also if it might apply to Facebook messages (we can dream, right?).
In addition to being a useful functionality, this is actually a fairly significant strategic move by Facebook, as essentially they’ve decided to sacrifice pageviews (by not forcing you to log in to comment) for conversation. In the long-term, that’s probably a smart decision, as it makes the Facebook social graph even stickier and alternatives (like Twitter) less necessary.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson tells us: “We are testing this feature and hope to roll it out to all users soon.”