Coming on Monday: Facebook Does E-Mail?
By Harry McCracken | Friday, November 12, 2010 at 7:50 am
Monday morning at 10am PT, Facebook is holding a press event in San Francisco. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports that he hears the subject is a full-blown Facebook e-mail service that gives every member an @facebook.com account. Inside Facebook, they supposedly consider it to be a Gmail killer.
If that does turn out to be the news, it’ll confirm a months-old rumor about a Facebook project code-named “Titan.”
I’m always up for an interesting new twist on e-mail, and am intrigued by the idea of an ambitious, brand-new Webmail service–at this point, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all hobbled a bit by their sheer venerability and deep roots in traditional ways of doing things. But as I mentioned when “Titan” scuttlebutt first surfaced, I also like the fact that the Facebook inbox isn’t a traditional inbox. It’s simple, nearly spam-free, and focused on communications with people I already know and like.
If “Titan” is real, I hope it doesn’t mess up all the things about Facebook communications that don’t need messing with.
I’ll be at Monday’s event–I’ll tweet highlights as they happen, then report back here once we know the upshot.
4 Comments
Read more:
4 Comments For This Post
November 12th, 2010 at 8:14 am
Oh no. Yet another reason why my younger relatives will ignore regular e-mails and only pay attention to Facebook messages. As one of the few who left Facebook due to their lack of respect for my privacy, I really hope they change their ways. Unfortunately, I doubt they will.
November 12th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Facebook's 'Titan' could be a real game changer – there is no denying that.
I have written about some of the great things we could expect from 'Titan', including a more social inbox – but also written about the 'cons' such as spam concerns stemming from facebook profile names and more.
http://jyml.me/9tqyny
Hope you enjoy,
Jay
November 12th, 2010 at 8:30 am
If this is a normal facebook feature, I would assume that all emails will be readily viewable by all your friends. Sorry, but Facebook security and privacy is a joke.
November 14th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
I’m always up for an interesting new twist on e-mail, and am intrigued by the idea of an ambitious, brand-new Webmail service–at this point, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all hobbled a bit by their sheer venerability and deep roots in traditional ways of doing things.