Facebook is set to announce a new e-mail feature on Monday that could challenge Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail as the most accepted online e-mail services, according to news reports on Friday.The service by the popular social networking company will for the first time permit the site’s 500 million members to use “@facebook.com” addresses and will also be integrated with Microsoft’s newly introduced Office online services.
Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most admired events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to show content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how strongly you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.
