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Facebook working on a Gmail competitor
If you hate the Facebook inbox as much as I do, this will come as welcome news; according to TechCrunch, Facebook will soon be launching a full webmail client.
Dubbed Project Titan it will be a full blown mail client similar to Gmail with full POP and IMAP support. According to Michael Arrington your address will be your current Vanity URL @facebook.com.
With 350 million active Facebook users automatically getting a new email address all other webmail services are about to get a monsterous new competitor.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentssodapopFeb 5th 2010 2:31PM
I get all my FB mail in my email client. Zero probs... Yet I have to wonder what the revenue stream will be from this effort.
WardFeb 5th 2010 3:54PM
Sodapop, I think the idea is that you'd use your FB email as your regular email address. That way you can do FB stuff and regular email all in one place.
Not my cup of tea, but I'm sure there are a lot of people that live in FB and would like to have a FB email.
sodapopFeb 6th 2010 12:51PM
@ Ward - I understand its another free email service...
What I am saying is if someone sends me an email on FB, I get notification in my regular client because it is forwarded to my user email address. From there I can both read the email and reply to it. The only thing I can't do is initiate an email.
But the bigger question is - what does FB corp get out of providing this service. Regular email usage would be huge server load and require more bandwidth, hardware etc. They must be planning on some kind of revenue. Certainly not the lame advertising they have now.
BenFeb 5th 2010 2:56PM
my vanity url is 39 characters long...
SDreamerFeb 5th 2010 3:04PM
Good, Google is finally going to get a proper IMAP competitor that is free. MS should implement IMAP to get competitive, they really have nice looking email service, but that lack of IMAP just prevents me from using them.
Jon NiolaFeb 5th 2010 3:09PM
I'd imagine they would derive revenue from contextual advertising like the rest of the site.
Still kind of odd that they would do this now. Seems like every major portal site is trying to be everything to everyone these days.
Makes me wonder if down the road we will see stratification like in other media like magazines and television where instead of going to a gargantuan all purpose portal, you go to a portal for "baseball" or "gardeners" that ties into the mega portals somehow.
gidleysFeb 5th 2010 3:16PM
If they could make facebook work reliably, they may stand a chance of market share...
Mark BowytzFeb 5th 2010 3:25PM
Am I the only one that thinks that all of these "me too!" features that Facebook is saying that they are going to add lately (i.e. copying Foursquare) seems...strange?
This is the sort of thing that I would expect from a site whose business model is going down hill and are trying to resurrect/reinvent themselves somehow.
ProlornFeb 5th 2010 3:51PM
... what?
Next up, Facebook OS!
JoshFeb 5th 2010 4:32PM
Meh. If their current work is any indication, I will be sticking to Gmail.
mkoFeb 5th 2010 6:12PM
They also said Facebook chat would be XMPP compatible. I'm still waiting ..
SugarDaddyFeb 5th 2010 10:23PM
As if facebook already wasn't the wild west of phishing schemes and identity theft... This seems like a mistake to me on so many levels. But hey, any competitor that could potentially get google to improve their already fantastic email service at a faster rate is fine with me.