16 January 2009 | Author: O. Gaywood Media Optimiser

MySpace to develop e-mail service

Back in 1997, when the internet was just a bairn, Yahoo employees moved from @yahoo. com e-mail addresses to @yahoo-inc. com. Not long afterwards Yahoo web mail was launched and everyone was celebrating that they had a tom@yahoo. com, dick@yahoo. com or harry@yahoo. com address.

Focus has now shifted to MySpace who has started to shift its workers to @myspace-inc. com, sparking rumours that all users will soon be the proud owner of their very own [username]@myspace. com address.

This will put MySpace in direct competition with the likes of Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail and AOL. With its current active user base (logging in at least once a month) of around 125million, MySpace would automatically become the web's third most popular e-mail provider behind Hotmail (284m) and Yahoo (277m) - Gmail currently has 118m, according to Comscore.

The first step towards this mail service was made early in 2008 when the social networking site integrated Google Gears into its messaging system, allowing users to search through messages and organise them by date, sender or subject - something that was previously unavailable, making the messaging system a bit of a mess. This came as a response to Facebook allowing people to send messages to e-mail accounts, but because the recipient has to log in to Facebook to view the message it was seen as more of a pain than a convenience.

MySpace messaging currently only allows one-to-one conversations with other MySpace users, which many users find very restrictive, and the expansion into a full web based e-mail service combined with a social networking site may give it the edge it needs to keep it ahead of Facebook in the rankings.

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