Is Facebook about to launch a webmail service? Erm… Kinda’

It has long been anticipated, the move by Facebook into a full email.  How the world’s biggest social network is holding a press event where they are widely expected to announce a new webmail service to rival Yahoo!, GMail and Hotmail (Live).

There can also be little doubt how successful such a service would be too.  I’ve recently, as you’ll have seen from my reviews, been using a Windows Phone and the social integration into my contacts in the device is a revelation.  It’s absolutely fantastic the way that Microsoft have brought my email and Facebook together so that sending an email or posting on a wall are just as simple, intuitive and, most importantly, brought together.
If Facebook are able to effectively bring email and social integration together in a webmail app then the crowds will flock to it.
The expected move, and I should point out there’s no confirmation as yet is being seen as another snub to Google and a continuation of arguments and disagreements between the two companies.  Google’s own foray into social networking ended in disaster and recent figures showed GMail ranking a long way behind Yahoo! and Hotmail for webmail usage with only 193m users to Yahoo!’s 273m and Hotmail’s 361m worldwide.
UPDATE ———————————–
It’s now been announced that Facebook consider email “too formal” which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given that almost their entire business model has been based on short messaging and chat.
Instead the company has launched a new messaging system that’ll handle email… hey! Hang on a minute!?  The company want to take the way we’ve been communicating on our computers for twenty years now and change it, why?  It could be argued why not.
The aim is to create a social inbox, which is a very neat idea as I said earlier.  Users will be able to have an ‘Facebook email address but the system itself will be far more social.
This could be a fight back against the software packages such as TweetDeck which have taken people away from the Facebook website (and consequently away from its advertisers).  Don’t forget though that this service is along the same lines of Google’s ill-fated Wave service.  We’ll wait and see what happens next.