Since first learning of Facebook’s Project Titan, otherwise rumored to be a “Gmail Killer” last Thursday, we launched a custom instance of Slurp140 to track the buzz. With the official announcement of Facebook’s Project Titan, to begin at 1:00pm EST, we present the ‘before’ results for your enjoyment: http://www.slurp140.com/titan 

With 30 minutes until launch: 8,089 total tweets by 7,533 people that referenced either the URL of the 11/11 TechCrunch article or one of the following search terms: [Project Titan” OR #projecttitan OR Gmail Killer, Facebook AND email]

A couple early points:

Although a few spammers have infiltrated the leaderboard, nobody has really sent more than 1-5 tweets about it pre-launch. Content wise, most tweets are either informative or quick reaction having to do with the competitive environment and whether or not people will actually use this new feature.

Of course, it will be interesting to see if the close ratio between the total number of tweets and the number of people tweeting holds.

From viewing the stream on and off, it appears that Facebook has definitely sparked some interest, but the jury is most definitely still out.

For a comprehensive look and analysis of the results check out our Impact Watch blog later this afternoon.

(Image is of the ‘Titan"’ 3-D home movie projector)