Will Facebook e-mail bring down Gmail, Yahoo Mail, others?

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on February 5, 2010 at 4:28 PM

Facebook is working on an e-mail product, and may have Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and others in its cross hairs.

The social networking site is planning to launch a completely new e-mail product in the place of its current message product, internally known as Project Titan, TechCrunch reported today. "Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at," Michael Arrington wrote, adding that he doesn't think the new service will be a "Gmail killer."

Image: castortroy520's flickr photostream

Thanks to Facebook's position as the place in which hundreds of millions of people already go to share and communicate, e-mail is a logical next step, Valleywag's Henry Blodget pointed out. The main reasons people visit Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, on the other hand, don't really have anything to do with communicating. Rather, they're about search and content aggregation.

"E-mail is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party Web sites each month via Facebook Connect," Arrington wrote.

PC World's Jared Newman wrote that Facebook could go a step beyond current e-mail providers by providing multiple inboxes (friends, family, colleagues, etc.), convenient access (an app or Web address to go straight to mail), optional threading and pulling in Facebook information, and the ability to manage everything from e-mail.

But not everyone is interested in having Facebook e-mail. The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm writes: "Having email tied to Facebook would merely turn an already over-featured, bloated, and slow social networking Frankenstein of an experience into one that I actually depend on to get work done. God forbid."