Saturday 14 April 2012

Facebook syncs Timeline and e-mail usernames.

Facebook created a system where users were able to create usernames for their profiles, so instead of a long number in their domain, a name like Mrxyz would appear. Facebook also had rolled out an email service for its users who would have a name@facebook.com and could communicate with other users of Facebook or even other services like Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail. Because the two services were launched at different times, users may not have created a username for their Facebook profile, while they did for email (and vice versa). Now, according to Mashable, Facebook is rolling out a program where the two usernames of both services will be synced (unless you have already chosen different usernames for both services, those will remain unaffected).

So now, if your Timeline username is Mrxyz, your profile address will be facebook.com/Mrxyz and your e-mail address will be Mrxyz@facebook.com. Another service, which has deep email and social networking integration is, you guessed it, Google. While Facebook is popular for social networking, its e-mail service has not really caught on and this move to integrate usernames might be directed at increasing usage of Facebook e-mail. Facebook even launched a Messenger app in 2011 to consolidate all Facebook communication in one place. The company launched an update to the app to remove cc and bcc from the 'e-mail' service to call it strictly messaging. Through this app, users could reply to another user's chat, e-mail and text messages as well as add information like location and photos.

The big draw of Facebook e-mail was what they called the 'social inbox'. What it does is it pulls data from the social graph and informs your inbox of which people you communicate with most frequently. It also pulls information on which messages are more important (if you'll notice now, Facebook messages too are seperated by important messages appearing in the main messaging inbox and unimportant messages appearing in a folder called "others"). This whole system was set up to take care of spam. Do you use Facebook e-mail? If you do, is it your primary e-mail? Let us know in the comments section below.

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