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Facebook may launch own email service


The grapevine is abuzz with rumors that Facebook will be launching its own webmail to compete directly with GMail and Yahoo Mail. How might Filipinos respond to this new service? A few days ago, technology blog TechCrunch speculated that Facebook is set to launch a web-based email client on November 15, Monday (Tuesday in the Philippines). TechCrunch said that Facebook may be able to leverage its existing strengths in media sharing and social networking, possibly integrating these into its email service. "Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion," said TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid. "And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely 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," he added. Are Filipinos ready for Facebook email? In October, GMANews.TV reported that the Philippines has the most avid users of Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter in Asia, according to Gartner research. Unlike other countries in Asia, the Philippines did not develop its own localized social media services. Instead, Filipinos were quicker to adopt more global services. "While Asia's biggest economies have been slow to embrace the global social communities of Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter, many countries in the region have followed the adoption patterns of Europe and the US. The most avid social networkers are in the Philippines, where Facebook is the country's most visited Internet site," the study said. GMANews.TV also came across the results of the Digital Life global survey of online consumption habits, which showed that Filipinos placed a higher value on emailing than their counterparts in other Asian countries. According to the survey, Filipino respondents said that emailing is the second most important online activity (36 percent) next to social networking (43 percent). In contrast, China —which has some 420 million online consumers, the largest of any country in the world— ranked emailing as the most important online activity (53 percent) followed by social networking at a distant second (17 percent). Given Filipinos'receptiveness to Western social media and the almost equal importance given to social networking and emailing, it seems that the Philippines might be a prime consumer of Facebook's new email service. It remains to be seen, however, if this turns out to be the case —presuming that the rumors of a Facebook email service are true in the first place. - GMANews.TV

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