Facebook to compete gmail, launch email service

Press Trust of India, November 14, 2010 (Houston)

Social networking site Facebook may soon offer e-mail services to its 500 million members to compete gmail and yahoomail, making it the largest such service on the planet.

More significantly, the offering could lead to a fundamental transformation of e-mail.

Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are already scrambling to re-tool their e-mail services to build them more around people's social connections.

Facebook would have a tremendous advantage because it owns a vast trove of data about people's relationships and would find it easier to graft e-mail onto its existing social services such as photo-sharing.

The launch of the new service will be made official on Monday.

Together with a likely announcement of a strategic alliance with Microsoft to incorporate the functionality of Facebook in the Office applications.

The new email Facebook will integrate fully the social network, using the working model of the network of friends.

An ecosystem of communication 'sensitive' to the world of relationships of people, able to combine text, pictures, music and video in a single container of communications. And to give this information flow a priority based on the social context of each.

More than just email and then, a real office staff to assess the quality of communication and understand what is more important or is most dear to you.

All this added a social network that is already the world's most used vehicle for sharing information, photos, videos, activities and causes. Every month there are about 25 billion content that Facebook users make available to the network of "friends" Digital.

The deal with Microsoft could transform into a business plaza. And maybe material for a sequel to 'The Social Network', the film about the history of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and his smash hit, the box office.

If it is announced, a Facebook e-mail service would allow its more than 500 million members to communicate with anyone inside or outside the walls of the social network. If they use it, Facebook would leapfrog the 361 million global users of Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail's 273 million users and Gmail's 193 million.

However, a Facebook e-mail service would be most remarkable not for the size of its network, but for how it could use its web of social connections to transform one of the oldest -- and perhaps still the most important -- functions of the Internet.


Read more at: http://profit.ndtv.com/news/show/facebook-to-compete-gmail-launch-email-service-121612?cp