With iOS 6, your address book may be invaded by @facebook.com email addresses
I'm generally a fan of Facebook. I only use it to keep in contact with people I actually know and hang out with in real life. And for my friends that live in other countries, it's the easiest way to share photos, videos, and other life events.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already tied members’ Timeline identities to their Facebook email addresses in April and then made @facebook.com addresses the default for all users in June. Reports of altered address books and lost email in July made the contact-data consequences of that policy unusually salient.
iOS 6 extends Facebook’s email-identity shift into Apple’s address book layer, where a social-network address can appear alongside the contact details people use to communicate.
First-order effects
- iOS 6 users integrating Facebook contacts may see Facebook-managed email addresses added to their address books, changing the contact record attached to people they know.
- Facebook gains distribution for its @facebook.com addresses through Apple’s contact interface rather than relying only on Facebook’s own site.
Second-order effects
- Apple’s integration can steer correspondence toward Facebook-managed addresses when those entries sit in users’ contact records, raising the practical cost of Facebook’s earlier address substitution for affected users.
- The prior address-book disruption reports put pressure on Facebook and Apple to make contact-source and address-selection controls legible, because users may not distinguish a Facebook address from an existing personal one.
Third-order effects
- If operating-system contact syncing continues to import platform identity data, the company controlling the social graph can shape the default communication paths used outside its own service.
- Address books become a contested distribution layer: convenience features increasingly determine which platform-owned identity is presented as the canonical way to reach a person.
The trend: Social platforms are using operating-system integrations to extend their identity systems from profile pages into the communication tools people use every day.