• GigaOm, Friday, September 21, 2007 10:34 AM

Earlier this week Yahoo completed the $350 million purchase of Zimbra, a provider of Web-based email (among other things), Firefox maker Mozilla spun off its free, cross-platform email client Thunderbird, and Xobni, a company that pledges to "take back" the inbox ("Xobni" is inbox spelled backwards), made its "impressive" launch.

A study that shows there are 1.2 billion email users and 1.8 billion people worldwide. Given that, could email--if better protected--become the foundation for a social network? It really should, particularly because younger generations rely on social networks more than email for personal communication. Email, they say, is for work.

But email also has "the essential elements needed for a social system", like an address book and contacts that are divided into friends, family, work and acquaintances, trusted businesses. Xobni, for example, does some of this organizing for you. Future versions will add social-style bells and whistles, like pegging Flickr photos to email addresses--which of course opens another privacy concern.

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