I tip my hat to MySpace. Losing traction to a competitor putting out kitschy services (i.e. Facebook and it's many applications)? Put out a service that actually revolves around what your users care about and use. I know personally quite a number of people that use MySpace and Facebook as a means of communicating with close friends, as opposed to traditional email; often which is reserved for more professional or less personal communication requirements.
Already though, I can tell there are going to be detractors "People wont take an @myspace.com email seriously" but I truly believe the idea behind this is to capitalize on connections already made, and simply remove the abstraction of a profile page to talk to the people on your friends list with much easier access.
Probably because a regular email system has no way of "blocking" a user the same way I can block people who are not my friends on those social networking sites from contacting me.
Also, their "mail system" displays ads. More ads, more chance at revenue.
Facebook lets you send email, not receive. I've always hoped they'd make an email system, if only because they've shown themselves to be experts at avoiding clutter.
On the other hand, if a good fraction of users were to get theirname@facebook.com, then the rest had variations on that theme, suddenly sending email to people would be much easier.
I'm happy with my @me, so I guess I won't worry about it too much.
Already though, I can tell there are going to be detractors "People wont take an @myspace.com email seriously" but I truly believe the idea behind this is to capitalize on connections already made, and simply remove the abstraction of a profile page to talk to the people on your friends list with much easier access.
MySpace just jumped ahead of the curve.