The internet has been buzzing with excitement over the anticipation of what Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is going to declare at a media event in their Palo Alto headquarters today.
The Social network organisation has refused to feed speculation on their announcement, and are going to solves all questions at their invite-only event at 6pm today, UK time.
However, reports suggest that the new service dubbed “Project Titan” by those working on it, will be a Facebook email service.
Reports in Mad.co.uk suggest the new email service will allow users to create accounts using the domain name @facebook.com.
The new Facebook email account is expected to directly rival Gmail a market leader in providing free email, and will only be accessible to Facebook users.
This announcement may appear underwhelming at first, making people believe that Facebook are about to enter the already highly saturated market of free internet that experiences few innovations.
However, it appears that Facebook mail is going to have a unique selling point, in its spam filtering capabilities.
Although specifics on how this email service will combat spam will not be available until the Facebook announcement, there are already various guesses at how Facebook will aim to cut that out.
One highly credible opinion comes from Craig Newmark of Craigslist, the original email list that went viral.
Craig Newmark explained in the Guardian technology blog:
Facebook email could indeed dominate all email because a Facebook identity (profile) pretty much ensures that there’s a real person behind it. It’s possible to fake a Facebook identity, but it’s a fair amount of work, way more expensive than getting a new gmail or hotmail account.”
He continued: “Let’s suppose that Facebook provides an email tool, and gives you options to control what email you’ll actually see. For example, you might tell Facebook email to only accept email from people with Facebook-verified identities. You might have different levels of email priority, from friends, fans, friends of friends, and so on.”
“Spammers can create their own Facebook identities to try to work around this, but that’s way more expensive than getting temporary email addresses, and that raises the cost of spamming people.”
Unfortunately nothing will be certain until the press conference later today. However, other sources have not only suggested that their email service hopes to cut out spam but that it will be integrated to work with Facebook’s chat and group features.
