Just recently, it has been announced that Facbook acquired Fb.com from the American Farm Bureau. At first the buyer cannot be determined as just a certain MarkMonitor was said to be Fb.com’s registrar. But after waiting for Monday, Facebook finally announced that they bought the domain but still has no plans on what to do with it.
But it looks like this is another Google and Facebook war as it has been reported by The New York Times and TechCrunch that this new domain will either be used for creating a new email service for the millions of Facebook users or is the email service of the social networking sites 1000 plus employees. Either way, it could still be an email service.
This new email service will be called Project Titan, which plans to revamp the existing messages inside Facebook, as well as make it a stand alone email service like Gmail and Hotmail. With this, this was also called to be the “Gmail killer”.
According to Eden Zoller who is the principal analyst of Ovum, “An email service from Facebook makes a lot of sense […]Adding email to the mix is a logical step and Facebook could tap into user data to provide an attractive, highly personalized service. You would also expect it to push mobile features given its big move in this direction.”
One of the possible features of Project Titan is for users having a @facebook.com email domain and will support Microsoft Office Web Apps. Other features are: photo sharing services which could be their main focus, games, applications and friend algorithms. This full fledged email service from Facebook will be a big step for users as they now love to share almost anything with friends through writing in the wall and FB’s private messaging. If this email comes to place, more users are going to be happy to use this new Facebook feature. But I’m also pretty sure that most of the users who will use @facebook.com email addresses will be more of the non-geeky type and will use the address for Facebook-related notifications.
If there is something juicy about Facebook launching their own email service, it’s that other email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL will be alarmed. Each one of them had new features added recently and they are suddenly bombarded by this news. And I’m pretty sure Gmail will be coming up with a new feature in order to boost up their email service to rival that of Facebook. These email wars are not new to me to or to anybody else, but I do hope they will not forget the quality of their services as well as what their users want.
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Tags: Facebook buys fb.com, Facebook email services, Facebook Mail features against gmail
