According to several reports Facebook.com will announce its own email system to compete with gmail and hotmail today at its a media event scheduled at its headquarters.
The email project has been named in house as Project Titan.
It is believed the service will let users set up an email account with the domain name @facebook.com, which will not function just as another email address but will l co-ordinate with Facebook’s chat and group features.
The announcement is expected to come today at an invite-only press event taking place at 9:30 AM PST in San Francisco.
If true, get ready for the another great vanity name grab.
I think they’ll be using their recently acquired FB.com domain name for email. The MX records (which are used in the DNS to route email) are already live.
“…another great vanity name grab.”
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Yep! Real.People will continue to walk away from .BRAND DNS
Software developers will continue to migrate to Real.People Name.Spaces.
Look at consumer products coming out this holiday season.
They don’t even resolve anything but .COM domains.
Ok domainers, time to grab your facebook email id.. Or maybe not, they might assign it based on facebook id and may even ban you for having multiple email address..
But its not going to be a big threat to gmail. The grandmas and girls who refused to part with their hotmail and yahoo ids will now flock to facebook.. It will be a threat to hotmails and yahoo..
or yourname@fb.com ?
or yourname [at] fb [dot] com ?
YourName@Face.Book.com
YourName@Face-Book.com
YourName@FaceBook.com
YourName@FB.com
YourName@FB
YourName@Face.Book
YourName.Face@Book
YourName.F@B
…
insert 🙂 in the last one F 🙂 B
that could be as well
Let’s also not forget the current discussion on Upper and Lower Case DNS
://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dnsop/current/maillist.html
Will you be ready to buy ALL of your .COM domains in ALL Case Variations ?
TheDomains
THEDomains
“Let’s also not forget the current discussion on Upper and Lower Case DNS”
I hope it will never done!
it doesn’t increase the domains’ business but KILLS the value of all existing .com
so… I can buy Sex, SeX, seX, sEx, SEX, SEx and sEX.com and resell them for $13M x 7 = $91 million??? 🙂
no doubt… the ICANN guys are geniuses! 😐
Personally I think it’s a big load of BS (pardon the language)! If you want to confuse the “everyday” internet users with all the upper and lowercase crap, go ahead. Why don’t we stop using chars all together, lets just start using IP’s instead, IPv6 ofcourse to keep is simple.
Creating brands and developing portals is going to be a nightmare if this upper and lower case DNS nonsense becomes reality.
Here is the report from cNet.com on this product
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20022825-36.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News-DigitalMedia
warning: going into fb bashing mode…
fb is nothing without email.
all the photos, info, videos, games, etc., etc.
means nothing *_unless_* a person gives fb their email address. in other words, fb needs user email addresses as much as any spammer or “online marketer” (you decide which is which).
in fact, as anyone who has watched the social network film has seen, fb couldn’t get off the ground without grabbing a bunch of email addresses from a source and without authorisation, emailing people (hey, that sounds like what spammers do), urging them to sign up (i.e. putting a link in the email).
think about that for a moment.
email is core to fb. it’s core to the www.
can fb just sit back and rely on word of mouth for users to show up at the fb website? i think yes, after they have gained so much momentum, they could.
but look what they’re doing.
the email just keeps coming.
and now, fb itself wants to be the email provider.
email is the mother of all protocols. it’s “sacred” to the most technologically savvy of old school geeks (one need only look at the size of their mail spools). and at the same time it’s also the most effective way to reach the most non-technologically-oriented casual internet user. it covers everyone in the spectrum.
cliches are brainless but here goes… “the more things change the more they stay the same.”
no matter how desperate someone is for the “new thing”, the truth is that it’s the “same old thing” which is the method that is *_proven to work_*. and, lo and behold, sophisticated investors like things that are *_proven to work_*.
email is the channel fb wants to control. because, 20 yrs later, email is *_still_* more popular than, and is for many the gateway to, the www. it’s where the easy money is. i would say “ask any spammer” but then i doubt those guys answer questions.
fb needs to figure out a monetisation strategy that works (it’s investors are waiting…)
or they can just use one that’s been proven to work for many years. email. aka “spam”, depending on how one defines “opt-in” and “opt-out”.
when users stop visiting fb, they get spammed.
Mr. T:
that would be too sensible. just like it would have been to use something numbers-oriented instead of the ridiculous name-based hostent and other structs that the berkeley group added.
the folks at at&t fixed this mess in plan 9. but their work came a bit too late to reach the “masses”.
case sensitivity is easy to implement and can be used for at least one security-related hack. emphasis on easy (if it were not easy it would be out of the question).
what seems ironic is that these name-based “human-freindly” ideas to encourage user laziness only serve to make it more of a headache for programmers trying to minimise potential DNS nonsense (e.g. insecurity). and the tedium of dealing with their stupid name-based abstractions scares most developers away. they don’t want to fuss with it, and who can blame them?
result: certain people have maintained a “monopoly” on certain DNS code, in which they take great pride.
tweaks, like adding case sensitivity, are “OK” and “doable” but replacing the whole mess with something that makes real sense (like what the team at at&t has shown they can do) is not an option.