Facebook forces all users over to @facebook.com e-mail addresses
Facebook began its jaunt as an e-mail service in November 2010, when it started allowing users to make @facebook.com addresses and receive conventional e-mails addressed there in their messages inboxes.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been circling e-mail for years: it put addresses back into plain text on user profiles in early 2010 after a privacy backlash, and ReadWriteWeb had already observed in 2009 that the social network was eating away at e-mail usage across the web. The @facebook.com address itself dates to November 2010, when users could opt in and receive conventional mail in their Messages inbox.
What changes with this move is consent: rather than offering the address, Facebook is overwriting whatever contact e-mail each user chose to display and substituting its own. The story travelled widely on the day it broke, picked up by TechCrunch, Business Insider, CNNMoney, BGR and Bits among others — a sign of how sensitive any silent change to user-facing identity data remains for a company freshly public.
First-order effects
- Every user's publicly displayed contact e-mail becomes an @facebook.com address unless they manually change it back, meaning mail sent by friends, recruiters and services now lands inside Facebook's Messages inbox instead of their chosen provider.
Second-order effects
- Conventional e-mail providers lose inbound traffic that Facebook quietly reroutes to itself, while Facebook gains a verified delivery path to every member — useful infrastructure if the rumored expansion of Sponsored Stories beyond the site into a web-wide ad network materializes.
Third-order effects
- If platforms can reset user-chosen identity fields by default, the address book itself becomes contested territory: whoever owns the displayed contact point owns the channel, and rivals' reach into a social graph depends on defaults rather than user intent.
The trend: Social platforms are converting user identity data into owned communication channels, replacing neutral contact points with addresses they control.