The Email Wars

I read this past week that MySpace is working on a new email system to give all of it’s 125 million active email users an inbox inside of the social networking site. Now this could be a game changer if they are successful with this integration and launch. Why? Well if even 20% of the user that LIVE in MySpace use this new email client it will make all of us look at feedback loops (do they exist), rendering, white listing, and how emails are forwarded inside and outside of the space. Now also to consider is what type of social media sharing tools MySpace might integrate into this new email client. 

We should all keep our eyes on this as I would assume that the main comp Facebook could be working on something to stay in the features war as well. 

Read the news at the jump >>

MySpace Building Stealth Webmail Product

MySpace is building a fully functional webmail product, we’ve learned from sources with knowledge of the product. MySpace mail will compete with services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL Mail, and will on launch be the third largest webmail provider in the world.

All MySpace users will be assigned an email address of [username]@myspace.com. The product is still in development, and we don’t know when it will be released.

The first hint of the new service was a reassignment of some MySpace employee email addresses to [name]@myspace-inc.com, which people have noticed. This is a sign that they are preparing to assign MySpace.com email addresses to users, which is exactly how Yahoo handled the transition when they launched Yahoo Mail in 1997 – Yahoo employees moved to yahoo-inc.com email addresses. We’ve subsequently confirmed that MySpace is currently building a webmail product.

The largest webmail provider today is Microsoft, with 284 million worldwide users (Comscore). Yahoo Mail is the second largest with 277 million users. Gmail and AOL Mail are third and fifth, with 118 million and 50 million users respectively. MySpace’s 125 million active users (active being defined as logging in once per month) would immediately make them the third largest provider, assuming those users log in to the messaging/email feature. That’s very likely, given that it is the one of the most popular social networking features.