Rumor around the internet is that Facebook is readying “Project Titan” for launch this Monday, November 15th. “Project Titan” is apparently the facebook codeword for their email application (or “Trident” I’ve heard both). This is very Big News as they are set, in a single day to become one of the largest webmail providers in the world (if not the largest).

Hotmail is the current king of webmail, with a reported 364 million users, Yahoo! mail follows that up with 280 million users, and GMail comes in third with 191 million users. Facebook itself claims they have 500 million active users, with the keyword being “active”. It is not known if Hotmail only reports active accounts (unlikely), or the number of accounts that have been created (likely). Facebook may automatically create an email account for all of its users, immediately making it the largest email provider in the world, even if many accounts don’t get used. It may also make it opt-in, but I think that’s unlikely as new features that are added to facebook are always opt-out.

Again, this is Big News, and will increase user lock-in with facebook, and they have shown they aren’t very open when it comes to exporting your contact data, though they recently have allowed you to export your content. Note that you can’t export your contact list from facebook, this is what led to GMail shutting down the GMail contact import into facebook. There is a ton of information available to facebook to make this email system very attractive to users, further integration with your events calendar, marketplace notifications, yet more ways to let you know someone is playing “Farmville”, etc. It’s also very attractive to facebook, as with Google, they are mainly an advertising company that happens to run websites on the side. The amount of data mining and user specific customization that this will allow them to do is huge for them.

I have been wondering when this was going to launch for about 6 months now as it really makes sense for facebook, they know they want to increase user lock-in, and cement their position as The Social Network. I’m looking forward to what features it will offer, how they create your email address (using your facebook username seems to be the simplest, but comes with some problems, like spam management), and what they will allow you to do with it (IMAP support please?).