Business

Gmail, Meet Fmail

It’s a testament to the enduring power of e-mail that the company that got 500 million people to communicate on its own private network might now be eager to give them a tool to break out of the walled garden and contact the outside world. Techcrunch speculates that Facebook will announce its own webmail client, […]

It's a testament to the enduring power of e-mail that the company that got 500 million people to communicate on its own private network might now be eager to give them a tool to break out of the walled garden and contact the outside world.

Techcrunch speculates that Facebook will announce its own webmail client, dubbed Project Titan, or the "Gmail killer," at a press event in San Francisco on Monday. Facebook is going ubiquitous on many fronts, notably its Facebook Connect service, so e-mail makes sense in a conquer-the-whole-universe sort of way.

Interesting, too, that this comes just as Google finally got around to cutting off Gmail contact imports to Facebook.

Will Facemail — or Fmail, or whatever they call it — be enough to dethrone the big three, namely (in order) Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail? Time will tell.

Some interesting speculated features include:

  • Spectacular relevance filtering, ensuring you only get the mail you really want, based on your social graph (Gizmodo).
  • Integration with Microsoft's Office Live web apps (Mary Jo Foley's All About Microsoft Blog).
  • Creation of a new developer platform that lets people share the whole web by e-mail, not just attachments (Allfacebook.com).

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Evan Hansen and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also: