The way most Internet sites make money is through advertising. It’s why Wikipedia comes scratching at your wallet around this time every year. They don’t have ad space on their site, so they are forced to subsist largely on user donations to stay afloat. And the only way to draw in the big accounts is to prove you have a viable pool of people to market to.

The only way to stay fresh, and avoid living life at the bottom of the barrel like Live journal, in this age of constant innovation is to find new ways of drawing people in and away from your competitors.

Techy gossipers the world over are gathered around digital watering holes all over the net discussing Facebook’s latest attempt to expand the borders of their social media empire, e-mail. If the rumors are to be believed, soon those pesky days of splitting valuable time between checking your e-mail and posting embarrassing pictures of drunken escapades on your profile page are over.

As it stands right now, the site offers users the ability to send messages between users, but not to anyone outside of the Facebook community. The new feature would allow users to communicate with anyone, whether or not the other person has a profile of their own and vice versa.

Some worry that the company’s new e-mail feature would not be as safe as Google or Yahoo, and really who can blame them considering the site’s history of security mishaps? Another valid point that has been discussed is whether people would really want to go through the hassle of switching their lives over to a new e-mail service that has yet to be user-tested from one that works perfectly well and they can trust.

I think for this whole venture to work, Facebook is going to have to offer some killer bonuses or abilities to make users want to make the switch.

The company has yet to officially unveil the new feature lovingly known as the “Gmail killer” amongst employees, but it may be only a matter of time before our inboxes are full of messages from @facebook.com addresses and the glory days of Google have faded into distant memory like AOL.

Molly Cahill is a senior prejournalism major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].