Mention email and everyone will probably think of Gmail – and for good reason. Google’s email offering has dramatically changed the face of communication, not just because of the huge amount of storage, but for me because it allowed me to have an ISP free email account that gave me both POP3 and IMAP4 options. Now it appears that Yahoo and Facebook are working on email related projects that both companies obviously hope to pull the email crown from Google.
According to GigaOm Yahoo is planning an email platform on which applications can be run. An early beta is expected to be launched in the not too distant future which will have a number of apps running in a sidebar.
Surprisingly I discovered that Yahoo has more than 200 million email subscribers which is one hell of a launch platform by anyone’s standards so this could be just the boost to bring the company back into the mjainstream where it has been seen to be lagging.
Meanwhile over at Facebook the company is said to be rewriting its messaging service with a fully featured webmail service nicknamed Titan. Filter through the rumours and you will find that Titan will have both POP3 and IMAP support and that your email address will feature your vanity name on Facebook.
The wags at FB are calling Titan the Gmail killer which is wishful thinking from where I am sitting. Click into Gmail’s web interface and then the Lads icon and you will see the list of add ons that Google has rolled out. OK, some of them are seriously gimmicky but knowing the company’s reputation for innovation I suspect there will be some substantial progress before either Yahoo or Facebook get their products out into the wild.
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