Facebook may launch email service

Social networking site Facebook is likely to offer e-mail services soon.

Houston: Social networking site Facebook is likely to offer e-mail services to its 500 million users from tomorrow to compete with gmail and yahoomail, making it the largest such service provider on the planet.

TechCrunch, a leading Silicon Valley technology blog, has reported that the social network plans to announce a Web-based email service complete with @facebook.com addresses at an event in San Francisco tomorrow. The blog said Facebook`s planned email service is part of a secret project known as "Project Titan" that is "unofficially referred to internally as its `Gmail killer.`" Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are already scrambling to retool their e-mail services to build them more around people`s social connections. Facebook would have a tremendous advantage because it owns a vast trove of data about people`s relationships and would find it easier to graft e-mail onto its existing social services such as photo-sharing. The launch of the new service will be made official tomorrow. Together with a likely announcement of a strategic alliance with Microsoft to incorporate the functionality of Facebook in the Office applications. The new email Facebook will integrate fully the social network, using the working model of the network of friends. An ecosystem of communication `sensitive` to the world of relationships of people, able to combine text, pictures, music and video in a single container of communications. And to give this information flow a priority based on the social context of each. More than just email and then, a real office staff to assess the quality of communication and understand what is more important or is most dear to you. All this added a social network that is already the world`s most used vehicle for sharing information, photos, videos, activities and causes. Every month there are about 25 billion content that Facebook users make available to the network of `friends` Digital. Made electronic agora, which previously showed some risk to privacy, promptly resolved. And the deal with Microsoft could transform into a business plaza. And maybe material for a sequel to `The Social Network`, the film about the history of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and his smash hit, the box office. If it is announced, a Facebook e-mail service would allow its more than 500 million members to communicate with anyone inside or outside the walls of the social network. If they use it, Facebook would leapfrog the 361 million global users of Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail`s 273 million users and Gmail`s 193 million. PTI