Must have been a slow news day. Or we have just become accustomed to being inundated with news about Facebook. The point is, Facebook email has existed for sometime. Perhaps not as a standalone service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail or Hotmail, but it is out there, it is used frequently and heavily. The existing email services should indeed be concerned about their marketshare.
As shown in my previous blog entry, webmail use, defined as those email programs most likely to be used for personal communications, is strong and vibrant within enterprise environments. The news that Facebook is expanding their webmail service should not be a surprise to anyone really, particularly since it has been one of the most frequently used webmail applications for 2 years running. From my previous entry on webmail:
Enhancing the existing webmail application is a classic market expansion. Facebook has a captive audience of more than 500 million users who use the application heavily. Why not expand the service offerings to include an more complete email service?
The table below analyzes the webmail traffic patterns viewed over the last four Application Usage and Risk reports.
Spring 2009 | Fall 2009 | Spring 2010 | Fall 2010 | |
Gmail | 22% | 25% | 27% | 22% |
Yahoo Mail | 20% | 17% | 15% | 25% |
Hotmail | 18% | 35% | 30% | 27% |
Facebook Mail | 0.2% (11th) | 1% (6th) | 1% (9th) | 3% (5th) |
Figure 1: Percentage of webmail bandwidth consumption by application.
The table shows that:
Facebook is leveraging its beachhead that the social networking and add-on applications have established, which will make this a very interesting battle to watch from the sidelines.
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