Facebook's Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product
Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it's known as Project Titan.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s reported mail overhaul arrives as the company, with nearly 400 million users, is broadening its challenge to Google and Yahoo while expanding its Bing partnership globally and taking responsibility for selling its own ad inventory. The Project Titan claim remains unconfirmed.
The idea also follows MySpace’s reported plans for a stealth webmail product in 2009, making mail another front in the contest to keep social-network users inside a single service.
First-order effects
- If Project Titan launches as reported, Facebook users’ existing messaging experience would be replaced by a fuller webmail product, concentrating more communications inside Facebook.
- Facebook would gain another product surface alongside its globally expanded Bing relationship and self-sold advertising inventory.
Second-order effects
- MySpace’s reported webmail effort would face a larger social-network rival pursuing the same retention strategy, with product depth in messaging becoming a competitive differentiator.
- Google and Yahoo would confront a Facebook challenge that reaches beyond social profiles into a service category central to repeat user engagement.
Third-order effects
- If social networks add full communications products, competition shifts from attracting profile activity to owning a broader daily-use communications hub.
- The pattern points toward large consumer platforms bundling messaging, search partnerships, and advertising sales into more integrated user-facing services.
The trend: Social networks are moving from standalone profile destinations toward broader communications platforms designed to deepen user engagement and monetize it across multiple services.