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.
More significantly, the offering could lead to a fundamental transformation of e-mail.

Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are already scrambling to re-tool their e-mail services to build them more around people's social connections.

Facebook would have a tremendous advantage because it owns a vast trove of data about people's relationships and would find it easier to graft e-mail onto its existing social services such as photo-sharing.

The launch of the new service will be made official on Monday.

Together with a likely announcement of a strategic alliance with Microsoft to incorporate the functionality of Facebook in the Office applications.

The new email Facebook will integrate fully the social network, using the working model of the network of friends.

An ecosystem of communication 'sensitive' to the world of relationships of people, able to combine text, pictures, music and video in a single container of communications. And to give this information flow a priority based on the social context of each.

More than just email and then, a real office staff to assess the quality of communication and understand what is more important or is most dear to you.