Not Content With Owning Your Social Network, Knowing Where You Are, Facebook Wants Your Email Too

According to a story on TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to release a “Gmail killer” at a special event during the Web 2.0 summit on Monday. While it’s not thought of as particularly cutting edge compared to social and mobile media, Facebook is the latest company to offer a reminder that e-mail is still sexy for big tech companies.

Well, maybe not sexy, but familiar and comfortable at the least. Facebook’s recently announced Deals program got a big kickoff with a partnership with the Gap, and Facebook’s other products – photos, events, games, business pages – have been wildly successful with their massive userbase, so there’s no reason to believe that an e-mail offering wouldn’t attract a few hundred thousands users.

For Facebook, notifications and messages could get priority delivery, and the inbox would be one more place to display ads. Already, comScore estimates that Facebook accounts for 24% of the online ads shown in the United States. {WSJ} Despite estimates of ad revenue at $1.28 billion, and potential revenue from Facebook Credits – the new payment system imposed on game publishers like Zynga (Farmville), the ads typically command significantly lower rates than display ads on other large sites.

For advertisers, web based e-mail typically doesn’t allow for the flashing, exploding, full page style ads that command the highest rates online, but the type of ads Facebook runs are more similar to the ones people are used to seeing in their email. Plus, Facebook’s massive amount of demographic data offers the type of targeting advertisers crave. Combine the basic age and location information that Facebook already has with knowing which topics and brands someone’s interested in, where they like to buy their jeans or get their coffee, and the possibility of 100% email delivery with an unmissable message in their inbox and the enormous potential of Facebook email is obvious.

Obvious, but for users perhaps a bit more in depth than some would like. Facebook’s survived privacy uproars that are too numerous to list at this point, so we can’t help but wonder how many users will be willing to add yet another layer to the growing stack of things Facebook knows about you.