The messaging system on Facebook is efficient in terms of allowing you to email your Friends directly through the social medium’s messaging system, especially if you need to message multiple people at once. This system was completely separate from the user’s actual email address, although depending on the privacy settings you created for your profile it was possible to receive an email notification sent to your primary email address informing you that you had received a message from a Friend on Facebook. However, a big change to the way Facebook handles your actual email address has created an immense amount of backlash.

It was possible for a Facebook user to allow an actual email address to be visible on his or her profile, but this option also gave the user the ability to set privacy settings in a manner to keep an email address private. Therefore, the fact that over 900 million users recently had their actual publicly displayed email addresses changed to their Facebook email address was very disconcerting. The format of a Facebook email address is facebook.url@facebook.com.

Part of the reason this change has angered so many Facebook users is the fact many people had no idea they even had a Facebook email address. If you were to a send an email to a Facebook branded address, the email would go directly to that user’s Facebook mailbox. More important, that user would NOT be notified with an email to his or her actual email address that the message was sent to the Facebook branded address.

Facebook issued a statement that “as we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines.” Unfortunately since an option was already in place that allowed a user to hide his or her email address from public view, this change is being seen by many as Facebook’s way of forcing users to utilize the Facebook email service.

If you previously had your actual email address listed on your profile and want to change your profile back to that style, please follow these steps:

• Click the “Update Info” radio button on your profile page
• Under “Contact Info” click “Edit”
• Go to “Email Address” and click any arrows next to email addresses you want displayed
• Pick who gets to view your email address and select “Shown on Profile”
• Save your changes

Have a great weekend!

Forbes.com – Nigam Arora – Why Facebook Forcing Its Email On You Is Brilliant
Search Engine Journal – David Angotti – Facebook Email Fiasco: 900 Million+ Profile Updates Without Permission
Search Engine Watch – The Inquirer – Facebook Email Address Change Incites Backlash
WPTV.com – Julianne Pepitone – Facebook email change info: How to get rid of that @facebook.com email address
ZDNet – David Gewirtz – Welcome to the soon-to-be enormous world of Facebook email spam