Email steal?
Users of Facebook are eagerly awaiting the company's presumed announcement it is rolling out its own email service, which many people reckon could spell the end for separate webmail entities.
If the rumours are correct Facebook will lift the lid on its supposedly dubbed ‘Project Titan' today, which will give Facebook users the option to have a shiny new @facebook.com email address, Tech Crunch reported.
The news website believes Facebook will unveil a fully fledged webmail client, probably released in a basic form but with huge potential. This would seem to make sense as Facebook reportedly has the world's most popular photos plus events products and could integrate messages from games into a news feed too. Of course it also has the huge advantage over its email peers of knowing all its users' contacts already and could therefore do a pretty nifty job at prioritising messages.
Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum, said a full email service will put the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! on the defensive. "It should also give telcos a lot to think about as Facebook is becoming an increasingly rich communication platform. All it needs to do now is put search into the equation," he said.
Zoller believes Facebook's base of 500m users that already use the platform to communicate and its games, location and voice services (with the recent integration with Skype) will stand it in incredibly good stead.
"Adding email to the mix is a logical step and Facebook could tap into user data to provide an attractive, highly personalised service. You would also expect it to push mobile features given its big move in this direction," he added.
Assuming the rumours of the email slayer are true, Facebook's ‘plan' might also explain its drastic move in annoying Google over the sharing of contact information.
Even before it supposedly launches its email service, Facebook has today been estimated to have become the US' third largest internet business, pushing eBay off its former pedestal, Bloomberg reported.
While Facebook has not yet floated, its stock is apparently trading for over $16 on an exchange for privately held companies, which would put its value at $41bn, eclipsing eBay's $39.3bn value on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Google remains the US' biggest internet company and is said to be worth $192.9bn, with Amazon coming in second, worth $74.4bn.
However, it is not known how much the social networking network is really worth if or until it becomes a public company, which could be years away according to a handful of experts. Yet, its value has reportedly trebled in the past year on the private exchange, SecondMarket.
