Facebook To Announce Gmail Rival?

Facebook is hosting a "special event" today in San Francisco, and much of the speculation is pointing to an e-mail service to compete with Google's Gmail. The two companies have been at odds lately with Google banning Facebook from importing G-mail users contact lists after Facebook refused to allow the export of it's user's friends and contacts.

According to TechCrunch Facebook's new project codenamed "Project Titan" is being called the "Gmail killer".

With so little regard for personal data Facebook will not be my choice of web based mail providers, Gmail is quite simply the best. That said, with half a billion users Facebook is bound to get the less technical amongst them to drink the kool-ade and jump on board. 

Source: BBC

Microsoft - Google Battle Over University E-Mail Management

Google and Microsoft are giving away hosted e-mail services to universities and colleges around the globe in the hope to hook students when they graduate. For the schools involved it's a can't lose proposition, cutting costs of both hardware and human resources and offering a bigger and better service to the students.

Jeff Keltner, head of Google's Apps for Education team says that administrators appreciate the cost savings and security benefits. "They walk away saying my data is probably safer in Google's data center than anywhere I would house it myself," he says. "And they appreciate the advantages to having data in the cloud, rather than residing on phones or laptops, which are devices that tend to get lost."

A 2008 national Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey indicates that 57% of schools who had outsourced said that they had opted for Google, while 38% had partnered with Microsoft.

Source: Time.com