In a move that could threaten Google, Yahoo and AOL, social networking giant Facebook is planning to launch a webmail service on Monday, Slate reported today.

"Facebook has the world's most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well," TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid wrote.

Image via CNet

The initiative (termed "Project Titan") is believed to have e-mail features that analyse events, photos and friends from a user's page and use the data to then analyse e-mail and short messages, The Inquirer reported. Users will have facebook.com e-mail addresses, the Financial Times informed.

"The big unknown, though, is what Facebook e-mail could supply beyond an inbox and address book. Gmail genuinely innovated with storage capacity, the ability to archive e-mail, secure communications by default, and customisation through labs features. What might Facebook accomplish, especially given its quantitative knowledge of who is most important to whom in the social realm?" pondered CNet's Stephen Shankland.

The social network might also be spending US$450 million on a new data center facility in North Carolina, the Times added.