Facebook Email

» see facebook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in november 2010 facebook held an event in san francisco to unveil project titan, which mark zuckerberg described as a modern messaging system. project titan included an @facebook.com email address for every user on the network. you did not need to apply for one, you did not need to opt in, and you could not refuse one. you had one because facebook had given you one.

in june 2012 facebook went a step further. it changed the primary email address shown on every user's profile to the @facebook.com address. the one you had not asked for and were not using became the one your old friends could see when they looked up your contact info. the change was rolled back after a few days of bad press but it stuck around as the defining moment of facebook deciding what should be on your profile without telling you. on 24 february 2014 facebook announced the email service was shutting down because most people had not been using their @facebook.com address. messages sent to it would forward to the actual email on file until further notice.

i had one. anyone with a facebook account in 2010 had one. mine was something like [email protected] and i never sent a single message from it. i remember finding the inbox accidentally one day inside the messages tab and being confused about whether the threads in there were emails or facebook messages or something else. that confusion was the whole product. it was the kind of feature that gets shipped because the company is excited about a deck rather than because anyone outside the company asked for it.

~ the case file ~

~ project titan ~

titan was sold as a unified inbox. one place for facebook messages, sms, im, and email. no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, just conversations. the press read it as a gmail killer. zuckerberg said on stage that it was not, then said it kind of was, then said it was not again. it was 2010 and facebook was at peak ambition. titan was the product where you can feel the company believing it could do anything, including absorb the entire concept of email into a chat thread.

~ the 2012 silent swap ~

in june 2012 someone at facebook decided that user profiles should display the @facebook.com address as the primary contact email. this was done across the entire network without notification. people who had listed their real email for fifteen years found a strange new address in its place. the change broke contact syncs, broke address books, and broke trust. facebook reverted within days but the moment had landed. that swap is the part of facebook email that anyone still remembers, more than the inbox itself.

~ what stayed ~

nothing in the product survived. the @facebook.com addresses were retired in 2014. messages forwarded for a while after that. the messages product became messenger and went its own direction. the unified inbox idea drifted to other companies, none of which made it work either. the lasting effect of facebook email is the lesson that you cannot give a billion people an email address and expect any of them to use it just because you handed them the credentials. people use the email they already use. asking the user is sometimes the entire product.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »