• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 22, 2009

In what could generously be described as a belated effort, MySpace is reportedly planning to soft launch its own Webmail client on Thursday.

The news was first reported Wednesday morning by industry blog paidContent, citing unnamed sources familiar with the initiative. A MySpace spokeswomen declined to comment on Wednesday.

Despite being so Web 1.0, Web mail remains an indispensable service for most Web users, and thus a battleground for top service providers. In May, for instance, Google revealed Google Wave, which it's billing as "the email of the future." Expected to be released later this year, the experimental project is the result of a multiyear initiative to reinvent digital communication by blending e-mail, instant messaging, and content sharing into something resembling a cross between Twitter, Facebook, and your standard email clients.

Yahoo, meanwhile, is reportedly close to acquiring Xoopit, a Firefox extension that works with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail to let users share content from their inboxes with social networks like Facebook.

Unlike a similar service currently offered by rival Facebook, MySpace is expected to provide users with their own addresses a la "@myspace.com." While a full rollout of the service is expected by the end of the year, some members already have access as part of the company's testing, according to paidContent.

The rollout comes at a time when the News Corp.-owned MySpace is scaling back many of its efforts. In June, it announced plans to cut its workforce by 30% -- and, so after, the Fox Interactive Media unit Photobucket let go a third of its staff -- or some 35 workers. (In mid-2007, News Corp. paid $250 million for Photobucket -- a one-stop shop for uploading digital pictures and videos online -- in large part to bolster MySpace.)

Once the undisputed king of social networking, MySpace has fallen to a distant second place during the past year. Today, market leader Facebook has over 200 million users, compared with MySpace's 130 million -- 70 million of whom reside stateside -- according to comScore.

The mail client project is apparently being run out of Seattle by what one source called "a bunch of ex-Hotmail guys," according to paidContent.

The number of people visiting Gmail grew 43% last year to 29.6 million, according to comScore. Yahoo Mail, meanwhile, grew 11% to 91.9 million unique visitors.

AOL Mail finished in second place for the year with 46.6 million unique visitors -- plus another 7.2 million visitors to AIM Mail -- while Microsoft's Hotmail actually declined 5% to 43.5 million, according to comScore.