It seems that Facebook is preparing for a major update to its service. They’re gearing up to launch an email service that claims to be the long-awaited Gmail killer. Rumors of starting your own email service have been doing the rounds on the web for some time, but now they seem to be close to delivering such a big blow to Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo services.
And it won’t just be an email service, it’s expected to be more like an upgrade to Facebook’s existing instant messaging service, which has great potential. All the social media expertise the company has could clearly help provide better service, like prioritization based on your contacts and other powerful features. They already have the most popular photos product, the most popular event products, and will soon have a very popular local deals product as well. They could also modify their email client to display the content of each of them smoothly.
The Facebook representative sent out invitations to various media outlets for an event Monday in San Francisco, believed to be the announcement of the web-based email service. However, it’s not official and all we know is that Mark Zuckerberg will be making a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. According to some online sources, FoxNews will cover the event live.
With more than 500 million members worldwide, Facebook could become the world’s most powerful free website and email provider and challenge popular email clients like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. Imagine the web hosting needs of such a service, hopefully the recently built data centers will cover this. Currently Hotmail is the true leader with more than 360 million users, followed by Yahoo with 270 million and Gmail with 190 million.
Although not all Facebook users will use the new email service, a large percentage of the user base will most likely do so. With its potential instant size and advantages to making email more useful, it’s sure to make other email giants very nervous. Actually, the Google vs. The Facebook war continues as Google stopped Facebook from importing contact information from Gmail last week after Facebook refused to share data about its users.
