Facebook Mail to rule the webmail world?
// February 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // web thoughts
When was the last time you logged into your Hotmail account? Not recently I would imagine…Facebook’s latest project is looking to make your Hotmail holiday a permanent thing.
TechCrunch has released details of a project codenamed ‘Titan’ that may well change the face of e-mail marketing. Facebook are planning to launch a full functional email solution much akin to Gmail or Hotmail in the coming months. So what will it include?
- Access from the walled garden of Facebook or via POP/IMAP (Outlook/Express/Live Mail can be used to read your email.)
- A unique @facebook.com email address. Probably based on your Vanity URL
The quick win could be for Facebook to utilise it’s Microsoft connections and base their email solution on Hotmail, but knowing Facebook they are going to develop this themselves.
If they do develop something unique to themselves from the ground-up then we could have a whole new email client to deal with – more testing of e-mail rendering and spam scoring is guaranteed…
So where does this fit in the webmail landscape? I think Gmail has a hardcore, committed following that love the labelling, organisation and simplicity of the conversation based layout. The big threat ironically could be to Microsoft and it’s Hotmail solution. This has become a spam filled webmail system that people are using as a rubbish bin for unwanted email. If a new solution was introduced that offered better spam control, a great user-interface and was hosted on a website you visited almost daily then I think the winner is clear to see.
This project is one that all digital marketers will have to watch closely.
Read more about this at AllFacebook in their 5 Features Facebook Should Add To Their New Email Product
Nicely described as a 15.4″ business notebook, it’s slowly become a desktop replacement and isn’t really ideal for people who are always on the move.
A single 4GB SanDisk Cruzer is all I had today, but various size variations of that brand and drive can often be found in my laptop bag.
In Ear Entertainment
Sometimes you hear about a concept that sounds to good to be true and I thought that was the case with the Zappos.com Culture Book. Fortunately after a little bit of Googling I found a blog post from a guy that had managed to get hold of a copy. He sang fantastic praise about the book and left a simple instruction on getting a copy if your outside the US – why not e-mail the CEO (Tony Hsieh)? So I that’s what did, in all honesty I was expecting to get an auto-reply or not hear anything at all, after all how many CEO’s have the time or inclination to reply to a request like this? Then within a couple of hours a response came back requesting my postal address and additionally offering a tour around their HQ if I’m ever in Vegas. Now this to me exceeded my expectations by a mile and has become a story I tell to a lot of people.