Facebook debuted a new app for smartphones Tuesday, allowing users to send text messages to each other from their smartphones using Facebook’s messaging system.

The app in question — Facebook Messenger — is an extension of Facebook’s existing messaging system, which allows two Facebook users to communicate within the Facebook platform. As a standalone program separate from the Facebook app, Messenger allows Facebook users to send text messages between phones, while still storing the conversation in a user’s messaging center on his or her individual Facebook page.

Facebook’s Messenger app is also capable of group texting, letting you pick multiple Facebook contacts and send them all texts at once. If a FB user is logged into the new message app, it’ll show up there. If not, they get the message sent to them as an SMS, so long as they’ve registered their phone with Facebook. The service is mobile-focused, so it doesn’t completely integrate with Facebook Messages, which tries to route a message to a person using whatever channel Facebook thinks is most likely for you to get it fastest.

The product stems from Facebook’s March acquisition of Beluga, a start-up founded by three ex-Googlers. Beluga’s mobile-based group-chat application allowed users to separate their friends into “pods,” or clusters of friends with whom a user can share texts and images. Many of Facebook’s past acquisitions were for talent-recruiting purposes, which meant closing and shuttering the company while using the new hires to work on Facebook products. Beluga and Messenger, however, are very much alike — conceptually, at least, if not technologically.

It’s essentially another move on Facebook’s part to lead users away from traditional forms of electronic communication — including open, standards-based platforms such as e-mail — instead pulling them further into Facebook’s proprietary platform. Last November, the company debuted its e-mail alternative, Facebook Messages.

Dubbed “the modern messaging system” by Mark Zuckerberg, Messages wrangles all private communication that occurs between two Facebook users — whether that’s an instant message via Facebook chat, or a private message using the traditional inbox — into one individual thread. Messages also came with an option to create a Facebook-based e-mail address. So if Facebook had its sights set on doing away with e-mail and instant messaging clients like AIM and ICQ by introducing Messages, with the Messenger app Facebook aims to do away with traditional SMS text messaging.

It’s also something of a slight at Google, which recently launched its Google+ network with an accompanying mobile application that allows for group smartphone chats for users who have the Google+ mobile client installed. Google’s version of Messenger is called a “Huddle” — both products essentially do the same thing.

Facebook, however, seems to have a leg up on Google’s group-messaging product. Currently, a Huddle group chat message can only be accessed by those with the app installed, while Messaging plays along with traditional SMS. Moreover, Facebook’s larger messaging system integrates all communication between users, whereas Google only archives chat and e-mail together, leaving Huddle messages in their own app.

The Messaging app is available for download in the Android Market or Apple’s App Store.