Facebook tipped to unveil new email service to rival Gmail

Social networking giant Facebook is reportedly set to introduce an email service for all of its 500 million users early tomorrow morning, with the company sending out invitations to a “special event” at which analysts say the site will launch the service to rival Google’s Gmail.

The announcement has been rumoured for some time under the name “Project Titan”, but new reports suggest the company will unveil a service that will see every Facebook user be given an @facebook.com email address.

Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch reported late last week Facebook had sent out invitations to a press-event set to begin at 04:30 AEST tomorrow morning. The site pointed out that this event, “is in advance of Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation on 11/16 at Web 2.0 summit”.

The site’s 500 million users will receive an @facebook.com email address, the report says. But it also says the service will be much more than a refresh of the site’s existing message system.

“Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.”

The advantages over Gmail are obvious: Facebook has 500 million users, well above Gmail’s reported 176 million, and as Steve Gillmor points out, the use of Facebook comments, Twitter messages and other event notification services using both sites have nearly replaced email for millions of users, especially younger browsers.

Such social features could be easily implemented into a fairly comprehensive email service, that could use a user’s existing social network to determine if certain emails are more important than others, for instance.  

“If Facebook reinvents email by submerging it in the stream, they’ll have something to announce. Meanwhile, Google continues to eat away at its notion of inevitability — panic bonuses and multi-million dollar retention offers mixed with data withholding gambits.”

“It never occurred to anyone that the data we give Google was valuable until they started hoarding it. We’ve known all along that Facebook was locking it up until they had so much momentum it didn’t matter.”

If Facebook is able to connect a user’s email account with their existing profile, the opportunities for organising messages and connecting them to the site’s other sections, like Facebook Places and the upcoming deals feature, indicate it may become a threat to Google’s dominance in the web-mail space.  

The introduction of such a service would only cement he rivalry between the two companies. Various reports suggest Google is losing employees to Facebook, as engineers become more attracted to the network’s smaller, start-up atmosphere.