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Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.

This isn’t a big surprise — the event invites Facebook sent out hinted strongly that the news would have something to do with its Inbox, sparking plenty of speculation that the event could be related to Titan. Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.

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 (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). 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.

Brace yourself! Here it comes…

Catch the Wave…

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Google Wave be the most innovative email tool since the dawn of email itself and the first 100k users have received access…

“Google Wave is one of the most anticipated new products to come out of Google this year. Technology blogs have been abuzz with excitement about this new communications and collaboration tool since Google first showcased it in May.

But so far, Wave, a shared online desktop where groups of users can exchange messages, share and edit documents, drag and drop widgets and play games, has been available only to a select group of developers. On Tuesday, Google is rolling out Wave to a slightly-less-select group: 100,000 users, including developers, people who signed up early on and some users of Google Apps, the company’s package of online applications.

In a blog post, Lars Rasmussen, an engineering manager for the group that created Wave at Google’s Australian offices, said that since the product was first shown publicly, Google has “focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability.” But he warned that bugs are still likely: “You will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.” (Of course, well-established Google products, like Gmail, also have had frequent bouts of downtime recently, including last week.)” Google’s Much-Anticipated Wave Opens Up a Bit – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

Unfortunately, no matter how much I begged, Google wouldn’t include me. Stay tuned for details as they become available…

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