Rumor has it that Facebook is launching a Gmail Killer. Codenamed “Project Titan,” this won’t be your standard Facebook messages with something like POP tacked on, but a complete rethink of your email inbox. The invites sent out for today’s event hint strongly at something related to mail or messages, featuring Facebook’s inbox icon on what appears to be a postcard. Jason Kincaid lays things out nicely:
Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.
So, basically, Facebook could be trying to do the same thing Google tried to do, except in reverse. Rather than jamming some social into your email, they will jam some email into your social. This could also explain the fight over contacts between Google and Facebook. Email is a hot commodity. AOL and Yahoo are both examples of high-profile companies taking heavy damage by losing email users. AOL announced plans to update the email interface this past weekend while Yahoo updated their mail product earlier this year. If implemented well, Facebook Email could have a serious impact on Google.
Facebook’s closed nature is both a blessing and a curse for a potential email product. As Craig Newmark points out, because it’s so difficult to fake an identity on Facebook, they could end up with the “most personal, and spam-free email available.” On the flip side, they could end up with something too rigid for the average email user to deal with.
The question is whether this is really what people want. Will they offer a service that is as flexible as your standard email account, or will their be restrictions related to its social networking ties? What are the privacy implications? We all saw what happened with Google Buzz. Does anyone really want to change email addresses?
What do you think?