Facebook may soon launch new e-mail service

Social networking site Facebook may soon offer e-mail services to its 500 million members to compete gmail and yahoomail, making it the largest such service on the planet.The giant social network - which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide - will host a special event in San Francisco on Monday (today). 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.