Facebook expected to launch email service

Hello Facebook lovers,  your favourite social network is expected to launch a new messaging system seen as a challenge to Google’s Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.The giant social network – which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide – will host a special event in San Francisco today.  So would you leave your regular email account for the Facebook service?

Unconfirmed reports suggest Facebook could announce its own e-mail address – @facebook.com – or even a fully-fledged web-based e-mail system. Google-Facebook rivalry has increased recently amid a series of disputes.

Google has banned Facebook from importing its users’ e-mail contacts, a move it says it made because Facebook refused to allow the export of contact and friend data from within user profiles.

In reply, Facebook enabled a workaround that let users save their Google contacts to their computers before importing them into Facebook.