Facebook's email service: The game changer?

By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 14:20 IST   |    3 Comments
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Facebook's email service: The game changer?
Bangalore: Now its time for all Facebook users to have an e-mail address ending with "@facebook.com", which is likely to propel Facebook's popularity to new heights for sure. The email service, code named 'Project Titan', is a full-fledged webmail client with huge amount of potential. This may the reason of calling the newcomer a "Gmail killer". We'll have an insight on its effect on Gmail later. Let's discuss first what it has got to offer. The email service, described by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "the way the future should work", has three key features. The first one is 'seamless messaging', which means that users can chat with people through whatever medium they choose, be it SMS, email, or IM. The second one is 'conversation history', which means that users can see everything they've discussed with each friend as a single conversation, and the third one is a 'social inbox', which will help filtering exactly the messages users want to see. According to the company, the new system is not an email service; rather they call it a new type of messaging that includes email as one part of it. There was a time when emails were transmitted directly from one user to another computer that required both computers to be online at the same time. But today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model, which means that email servers now can accept, forward, deliver and store messages. And with this product form Facebook that includes SMS to chats; the emails are heading towards the era of "next generation" meaasaging. Being a product from a company which is frequently hit by privacy issues, the email service from Facebook does raises privacy and security concerns. Privacy advocates said it will result in more user data falling under the control of the world's largest social network. As a product form the Facebook camp, the new email service is certain to cause concern among privacy advocates as more of the users' data will go in the hands of the social network, and they are likely to be mined for keywords to better target advertising at the users. But whatever the outcomes, the new email service will be challenging other web mail applications like Yahoo mail, Windows Live Hot mail and Gmail. Facebook and Google are in a deepening spat over exporting contact lists and are trying to establish their dominance on the Internet. While Google has been in continuous denial that it's developing a social networking platform to compete with the rival Facebook, the social networking site's launching of the new web-based email client has given a new twist in the tale. It is interesting to see that in order to retain staff engineers Google is offering hefty sums in the range of $3-$3.5 million, to turn down Facebook offer. The launching of Facebook's new Webmail service is an example of good timing. According to a recent Gartner prediction, 20 percent of workers will use social networks as their primary vehicle for business communications by 2014, and this Facebook email likely to fit into that scenario pretty well.