In case you missed it, today at 10 a.m. EST Facebook will unveil "," a Facebook-based Webmail system -- aka, the "Gmail killer." Or so I've read about 10,247 times since last Thursday. Hope I didn't shock you with that one.

[ Have you encountered ? Send your memorable tale to . If we publish it, we'll send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. | Get a new tech tale delivered to your inbox every week in . ]

In a few hours we'll be taking a blogbath in whatever news Facebook spills out onto the InterWebs, along with endless analysis, parsing, regurgitation, entrail readings, and churned out by bloggers who are clearly paid by the page view.

Before we get into that, though, let me rant a bit about that spread across the Web last weekend like a bad rash. Here's a news flash for lazy headline writers: Gmail is not dead, nor is it in danger of expiring any time soon. FaceMail or Fmail or FBmail or whatever Project Titan ends up being called is as likely to send Gmail to the great hereafter as Gmail was to whack Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Mail was to snuff out Hotmail. Free services never die -- they just become disposable tools for spammers.

Gmail is unlikely to suffer that fate, though, because it's been adopted by small businesses in a way that Hot/Yahoo have not, and because it's kind of essential to anyone who owns an Android phone -- which will soon be , if current trends hold.