Feb 5, 2010
Facebook Gmail Competitor
One of the things I hate most about Facebook is the mail section, which is old fashioned, very backwards and difficult to manage any volume of mail with.
I read today; via twitter, that Facebook are planning a new mail system entirely (dubbed Titan), which would provide it’s users with fully functional email addresses available from within Facebook.
The interesting thing is that apparently their planning on allowing POP3 and SMTP access to the mail, which means users could access their mail without signing into Facebook. As a full mail-service, that puts it into direct competition with Gmail, and as Facebook will roll it out to all their millions of users; Facebook already have a massive number of users. (although; how many will actually use the service I don’t know)
I can see it working really well; because users, especially younger ones, will then see Facebook as a complete solution for email and social networking, and except for msn messenger, Facebook email will most likely do everything that Hotmail does (plus threading), accessible from somewhere everyone goes already – it could be a winner.
It’d be nice to see how well Facebook implement a mail client – I’m looking forward to seeing.
I can’t see it working, personally; it’s just another one of those useless functions that no-one will use, like Microsoft tried to do with those Windows Live Spaces thing. Plus, it’s made by Facebook, so it’ll probably crash every two seconds.
Yes, but there is the factor that Facebook has 450m users; and more than 100m of those sign in daily. As a simple ease of use thing; I think people would rather just sign into Facebook and check social networking and email in one go, rather than signing into hotmail too.
So in that sense they have an automatic kickstart user wise; if they manage to make it decent then it does maybe have a chance.
The point about crashing is definitely valid, though =P.