yourname@facebook.com !!

It is basic human nature that until there’s something ten times better and ten times faster, there will be no reason to switch to something else. The point is to decide whether what is going to be available soon is better? Faster? What I am talking about is Facebook-email. Will it outdo Gmail, MSN Live, and the likes? Will you and I make the shift to Facebook-email for personal and professional use?

And the buzz is still on, since the time Facebook's CEO Mark Zukergerg announced the launch of this email service on Monday. Facebook, a social networking site, not only reduced other networking sites like Orkut to shambles but also overtook MSN Live and Gmail as the most viewed site earlier this year. Now the question is whether Facebook-email can do the same. Can it outdo the number of users MSN Live and Gmail are proud of?

With this email system nicknamed 'Project Titan,' Facebook hopes to bring together instant messages, text other non-Facebook systems into one place- A Facebook user's account. The idea is to make it easier for people to stay connected and communicate better. Of course it is a great idea, considering that you won't have to worry about different accounts for social networking, chatting and emailing. You can easily do it through one account. Its more like a sigh of relief for those who use net on phone. because now instead of being able to open only one application at a time, you can be on Facebook as well as email!

The kind of image Facebook has had until a few years back has been completely non-serious, more like a time-pass. It is now that professionals have started using the platform offered by Facebook at the corporate level. So, what needs to be thought about, not only by me, but by the Facebook guys is how many people are actually going to make this shift from other webmails to Facebook-email? The question is tough and the situation is dicey.

With more than 500 million users, that Facebook proudly boasts of, even if half of them switch to Facebook-email, it would be a big achievement to start with. From what I can see around me, many avid Facebook lovers are very excited about this new feature which according to them holds a lot of promise.

Also, with more than half of India's population being young, the switch doesn't seem to be too difficult to achieve. After all, young people are going to be more open to experiment.

All said and done but why the Facebook-email? As CEO Zukerberg said, "It is just a way to take Facebook forward and give the users something new and better." Though what comes to my mind is taking Facebook ahead of whom? Like I wrote , Facebook definitely took the world by storm six years ago and Orkut could never recover from the shock but in recent years it has faced tough competition from Twitter, the celebrity social network. Maybe that is why Facebook needed to be taken forward..

I am not sure how good this service will turn out to be in terms of popularity but it is going to accelerate the revenue generation, and thats for sure.  Thats obvious. As more and more people keep logged into not just Facebook for social networking but also for Facebook-email, more and more revenue will be generated through advertisements that would keep pouring in with additional services.

And finally just like the CEO himself said, "I don't expect people to wake up tomorrow and say, 'I am going to shut down my Yahoo account or Gmail account'... Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out, people will start to say this is how future should work."

Till then all we can do is Wait and Watch.