Facebook held a special event this morning to make an announcement that rumor purports will involve “Project Titan” – a Facebook based email service that is supposedly referred to internally as the “Gmail killer.” This will be more than just a revamp of the internal Facebook messenger system, converted to talk to other email servers via a POP access. Titan is purported to be a full-fledged webmail client that will supposedly sort your incoming emails based on preferences from your “friend” list.
While the idea of an email service that delivers important emails from important people first is intriguing, some of the other implications of putting even more of our daily communications in the hands of Facebook are not so encouraging. If users integrate their email completely into the Facebook system, that gives the Facebook ad machine even more access to what users are talking about, looking at and buying. If you thought Facebook knew too much about you before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
With the security breaches that still plague Facebook, the idea of funneling even more potential ad data through their servers may not appeal as much to their older users. For younger users, Facebook email may face a totally different problem. College age kids and younger see email as something of a dying medium, and integrating it into the Facebook universe may push Facebook even further from the thing that made it so successful in the first place, it’s “cool” factor.
Will @facebook.com email really be a “gmail killer”? It seems unlikely, but Facebook itself is a long story of “unlikely” so who knows what the future holds?
